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On my local board, the drop is noticeable (38,85%) in the last 10 months, but not dire not as steep as other local boards. On a day to day viewing of the board, it is rather scarce now in content creation and participation, and even the Beginners & Help equivalent section is way below what it was before.
It’s not easy to derive the motives (aside from general market trend), and merits likely have a role. Due to that, I eventually took it down one more level on my local Spanish board (see
Análisis - Foro local Español - Posts, sMeritos y su reparto en 10 meses – in Spanish though (*)).
What I did there is calculate the Share of Posts within my local board, going down into the first layer of child boards, and based on the posts created there over the last 10 months. That way, I was able to treat my local forum not as a whole single entity, but as a collection of subboards.
The interesting thing I found was that 73,74% of the posts were in the Altcoins child board. Since I barely visit that child board, I wasn’t aware of this proportion, which obviously has a great influence in the merit per post ratio. For example, the main default section has a merit to post ratio of 0,138 (3 times above the average of the Spanish local board on the whole), while the Altcoin bares a measly 0,008 merits/post (nearly five times less than the average).
These differences can only be seen by breaking down the local boards at least one additional level. Aside from that, local context is normally required to interpret the results. Since it would be rather time consuming, I cannot do an analysis such as the above referenced for the Spanish local board for all the local boards, but if anyone feels up to it for their local board, I can help them in the process if they want.
