Which Politics threads burned brightest in Q3?
10-11-2014
, 02:13 PM
1. General Post Metrics
For the three-month period 7/1/2014 - 9/30/2014, I collected 47406 posts from 783 different posters (29481 from politics, 17925 from unchained).
Once again, it's a very top-heavy distribution of posters. The top 20 posters accounted for 17858 posts (38%) and the top 1% of posters (8) had 22% of the posts. Not unlike income inequality, this phenomenon might be called "influence inequality".
2. General Thread Metrics
During the quarter, there were 231 active threads (120 in politics, 111 in unchained). The median was 36 posts per active thread. The top 20 threads produced 70% of the volume, with the top 3 alone producing 41%.
3. Thread Bursts
To see which threads really blew up, I looked at burst rates, meaning a large number of posts in a fixed amount of time (either a day or an hour). The top daily burst was 505 posts, which happened in the Mike Brown thread on 8/18. In fact, 7 of the top 10 bursts were in that thread.
The top hourly burst was also in the Mike Brown thread on 8/18, between 18:00 and 19:00. Once again, most of the impressive bursts happened in the Mike Brown thread. One interesting thing here is the quick burst of Sklansky's "Are There Flaws In Daniel Negreanu's Israel/Palestine Post?" thread, which then tapered off pretty quickly.
4. Thread Averages
Finally, I looked at which threads were able to sustain a high volume during their active periods. This means again slicing up each thread into fixed periods (days or hours), then eliminating all periods where there was no activity and averaging the rest. Using this methodology, some relatively minor threads could score big if their activity was concentrated into a few periods. For example, the "Should racism be allowed in unchained?" thread was active on only 7 different days (9/1 through 9/8 excluding 9/7) but made the top 10 with 360 posts during this period.
The hourly averages looks pretty similar. "Does whining about Political Correctness" is the top on both charts. That thread had 1610 posts during the quarter, and it's probably blown up even more since then. Ironically, the October LC thread is on this chart since it had 19 posts during the 3 hours it was up before the end of the quarter. At the tail end of this top 10 is the "petition to remove Spank as a mod" which had 302 posts over 57 active hours.
5. Conclusion
The concentration on timestamp analysis didn't turn out to be quite as interesting as I'd hoped. Not enough shaming of individual posters maybe. But one thing seems clear: there is value in Unchained, at least in terms of posting volume and interest. Sure, most of the content is petty bickering and meta-posting (i.e., posting about posting). But from one perspective, the market is speaking. The heart wants what the heart wants.
Previous Quarterly Analysis Threads:
Which Politics regs write at the highest grade level?
Which Politics regs quote each other the most?
For the three-month period 7/1/2014 - 9/30/2014, I collected 47406 posts from 783 different posters (29481 from politics, 17925 from unchained).
Once again, it's a very top-heavy distribution of posters. The top 20 posters accounted for 17858 posts (38%) and the top 1% of posters (8) had 22% of the posts. Not unlike income inequality, this phenomenon might be called "influence inequality".
2. General Thread Metrics
During the quarter, there were 231 active threads (120 in politics, 111 in unchained). The median was 36 posts per active thread. The top 20 threads produced 70% of the volume, with the top 3 alone producing 41%.
3. Thread Bursts
To see which threads really blew up, I looked at burst rates, meaning a large number of posts in a fixed amount of time (either a day or an hour). The top daily burst was 505 posts, which happened in the Mike Brown thread on 8/18. In fact, 7 of the top 10 bursts were in that thread.
The top hourly burst was also in the Mike Brown thread on 8/18, between 18:00 and 19:00. Once again, most of the impressive bursts happened in the Mike Brown thread. One interesting thing here is the quick burst of Sklansky's "Are There Flaws In Daniel Negreanu's Israel/Palestine Post?" thread, which then tapered off pretty quickly.
4. Thread Averages
Finally, I looked at which threads were able to sustain a high volume during their active periods. This means again slicing up each thread into fixed periods (days or hours), then eliminating all periods where there was no activity and averaging the rest. Using this methodology, some relatively minor threads could score big if their activity was concentrated into a few periods. For example, the "Should racism be allowed in unchained?" thread was active on only 7 different days (9/1 through 9/8 excluding 9/7) but made the top 10 with 360 posts during this period.
The hourly averages looks pretty similar. "Does whining about Political Correctness" is the top on both charts. That thread had 1610 posts during the quarter, and it's probably blown up even more since then. Ironically, the October LC thread is on this chart since it had 19 posts during the 3 hours it was up before the end of the quarter. At the tail end of this top 10 is the "petition to remove Spank as a mod" which had 302 posts over 57 active hours.
5. Conclusion
The concentration on timestamp analysis didn't turn out to be quite as interesting as I'd hoped. Not enough shaming of individual posters maybe. But one thing seems clear: there is value in Unchained, at least in terms of posting volume and interest. Sure, most of the content is petty bickering and meta-posting (i.e., posting about posting). But from one perspective, the market is speaking. The heart wants what the heart wants.
Previous Quarterly Analysis Threads:
Which Politics regs write at the highest grade level?
Which Politics regs quote each other the most?
10-11-2014
, 02:29 PM
10-11-2014
, 03:07 PM
10-11-2014
, 03:49 PM
10-11-2014
, 06:37 PM
10-15-2014
, 06:20 PM
10-16-2014
, 05:12 PM
