Has the average number of posts increased?

February 10, 2011 6:32 PM

Has the average daily count of front page posts increased over the last five years? When I joined back in 2006, I seem to remember the average being something like 23-25 posts a day. Now it seems to be about 33-36 posts a day. Do the numbers back me up? Or am I imagining things?
posted by jason's_planet to MetaFilter-Related at 6:32 PM (43 comments total)

I believe you are imagining things. I believe this has come up before and the answer is that it's not increased. I could be making all this up.
posted by cjorgensen at 6:44 PM on February 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

According to Waxy.org's Mefi stats, the posting rate has actually stayed fairly steady over the last few years at roughly 700 posts per month (though the number of comments has steadily increased). It only covers up to 2009, but I doubt the trends have changed much since then.
posted by Rhaomi at 6:53 PM on February 10, 2011 [2 favorites]

2006 - 25.9 posts/day
2010 - 30.6 posts/day
posted by lukemeister at 7:01 PM on February 10, 2011

It's up a little but not a lot, if I recall correctly. Same thing in AskMe which I think is seeing a little more of an uptick, but cortex can say for certain.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:08 PM on February 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

Misspellings and dropped are way the heck up, though. I attribute this to smartphone use.
posted by five fresh fish at 7:37 PM on February 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

It's up a little but not a lot, if I recall correctly.

Cripes. If only I had a nickel for every time I heard that expression.
posted by PareidoliaticBoy at 8:04 PM on February 10, 2011 [3 favorites]

It definitely seems like it to me. Most days, I'm waking up just as most of MetaFilter is going to sleep. That means I usually wake up to 20 or 30 posts on the blue, and aroun 40-60 asks. It does feel like there are more posts than there used to be, and it's definitely harder for me to keep up.
posted by Ghidorah at 8:07 PM on February 10, 2011

" Most days, I'm waking up just as most of MetaFilter is going to sleep.That means I usually wake up to 20 or 30 posts on the blue, and aroun 40-60 asks."

Even I can solve that. Get up earlier. Cripes.
posted by PareidoliaticBoy at 8:20 PM on February 10, 2011

Here are the results of a quick, simple query:

2000 - 12/day
2001 - 21/day
2002 - 23/day
2003 - 20/day
2004 - 20/day
2005 - 24/day
2006 - 23/day
2007 - 25/day
2008 - 24/day
2009 - 24/day
2010 - 27/day
posted by pb (staff) at 8:58 PM on February 10, 2011 [3 favorites]

Were you counting deleted posts, lukemeister?
posted by pb (staff) at 9:00 PM on February 10, 2011

I get up around 6 am, where I live.
posted by Ghidorah at 9:05 PM on February 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

Not sure why exactly, but I'm surprised by the consistency.
posted by -t at 9:45 PM on February 10, 2011

I get up around 6 am, where I live.

The man already gave you a solution! Get up earlier.
posted by graventy at 10:35 PM on February 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

Get your rest, Ghidorah. What if you got up and there were no posts?
posted by Cranberry at 11:34 PM on February 10, 2011

I think the five dollar bar may mean the new user rate only slightly exceeds the attrition rate.
posted by BrotherCaine at 12:14 AM on February 11, 2011

Hi Jason!
posted by vrakatar at 12:38 AM on February 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

The number of posts has stayed the same, but the quality of the posts has declined.

Because, you know, things were better in the old days.
posted by twoleftfeet at 2:13 AM on February 11, 2011

I wonder if the variance has changed at all? Like the average increase is slight, but they are more likely to be on the weekdays, so it's more like 35 posts then vs. 25 Saturday and Sunday?
posted by Diablevert at 2:18 AM on February 11, 2011

Well, after [more inside] functionality was added to the Blue, posts are longer and therefore it takes longer to read the posts. That could make it seem like there's been a significant increase.
posted by Kattullus at 3:07 AM on February 11, 2011

I think it's absurd that the posting interface for the Blue elevates "Link URL" and "Link Text" when the norm now is to make multi-link posts in the "Description" and "Extended Description" fields.

There's some weird old idea that Metafilter is about sharing a link. Posting a link is mindless - a task for grandmothers who have just learned to forward email. Metafilter is far beyond that now, but the posting interface hasn't caught up.

Furthermore, I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their scanners, or why.
posted by twoleftfeet at 3:57 AM on February 11, 2011

I blame SLYTs.
posted by Decani at 5:54 AM on February 11, 2011

I prefer a good single link to someone searching for all the YouTube videos an artist has ever made and linking them. But it's a lot harder to find the first than to create the second, so I'm not surprised that's the way it's going.
posted by smackfu at 6:09 AM on February 11, 2011 [3 favorites]

pb,

Yes, I was including deleted posts.
posted by lukemeister at 6:40 AM on February 11, 2011

Now, do the same for askme, and prepare to have your mind blown.
posted by cashman at 7:39 AM on February 11, 2011

Misspellings and dropped are way the heck up, though. I attribute this to smartphone use.

he'lls yes.
posted by The Whelk at 8:51 AM on February 11, 2011

twoleftfeet: There's some weird old idea that Metafilter is about sharing a link. Posting a link is mindless - a task for grandmothers who have just learned to forward email. Metafilter is far beyond that now, but the posting interface hasn't caught up.

I disagree. The hard part is finding an interesting link. Making up a post once you've found that link is not quite mindless drudgery, but that's the easy part. I can Google for information, go to Wikipedia, or visit my local library, but I can't find what I don't know is out there.

Also, I've been thinking about [more inside] today. I think it's made MetaFilter (by which I mean The Blue) less user-friendly. Before [more inside] you could read over the front page and get all the information you needed about each post. Now the reader has to leave the front page or open new tabs to know what some of the posts are about. It takes more time now to follow MetaFilter. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's definitely a different experience.
posted by Kattullus at 10:10 AM on February 11, 2011

[more inside] simply codified something that was already happening. If you pick a random month in the archives before the feature existed, say June 2005, and do a Ctrl+F find for "more inside", you'll see that many posters used the first comment to expand on the post. You'd still need to follow those to get the whole post just as you do today. Making it an official site feature has potentially increased the behavior, but the lack of the feature wouldn't stop it.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:20 AM on February 11, 2011

That is absolutely true, but it's a very large increase. June 2005 has 19 more insides, or about 2 ever 3 days, while June 2010 has 353, or almost 12 per day.

June 2010 had 843 posts so over 40% of posts have more inside while in June 2005 there were 705 posts, so only 2.5% of all posts had more inside.

What used to be rare is now common.
posted by Kattullus at 10:41 AM on February 11, 2011

It becoming more common isn't surprising to me (and was one of the things we weighed back when we talked about making MI a proper function a few years ago), but pb's suggestion is going to get you an low estimate of the actual oldschool use I think; not everybody explicitly used the phrase "more inside" back in the day. To really check it out you'd have to look at threads with early comments by the poster and sort those into MI vs. chatter situations.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:50 AM on February 11, 2011

The ultimate rainy day project.* Those first comments would have to be fairly long and linkheavy. There's a difference between a proper more inside and a "oh forgot this one link" or a "I didn't want to include my opinion in the post but..."

I'd be surprised if, prior to more inside post functionality, there had been much more than 1 more inside a day.


* For someone else :) I don't have the skills to do it properly.
posted by Kattullus at 11:02 AM on February 11, 2011

I remember when we launched MI on Ask I wrote a script to find first comments by the OP, make them [more inside], and delete the comment. And it wasn't an insignificant number. (Tracking down the percentage is another rainy day project.) The practice was so common there that we needed to go that extra mile. So this could be a case of Ask influencing all of the other sites. It was happening on MeFi too, but not to the same extent.
posted by pb (staff) at 11:09 AM on February 11, 2011

Yeah, it's absolutely necessary on AskMe to have more inside functionality. I'm more thinking about the Blue. I guess, when it comes right down to it, my contention is that back before more inside became a post functionality on the Blue it was possible to skim over the front page of MetaFilter and get the whole of each post. Now the MetaFilter reader needs to go onto another page to see the whole post. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing or a good thing, but it's a difference. It takes more time to read the MetaFilter front page.
posted by Kattullus at 11:26 AM on February 11, 2011

I blame SLYTs.

It'll never happen but I wouldn't mind a Metafilter Day Without YouTube.
posted by tommasz at 11:56 AM on February 11, 2011

A long time ago jessamyn brought up the idea of a 'no-MeFi-day' where MetaFilter gets turned off for one day. I've always thought that might be a nice thing to do. That would, by definition, also be a MetaFilter Day Without YouTube.
posted by Kattullus at 1:01 PM on February 11, 2011

A long time ago jessamyn brought up the idea of a 'no-MeFi-day' where MetaFilter gets turned off for one day.

It would be like a return to the ol' Cold Fusion/ Jrun days!

please God no
posted by Fuzzy Monster at 2:20 PM on February 11, 2011

FWIW, these are still the ColdFusion days, it's just that the old jalopy's running a lot cleaner after some improvement in the quality of parts from the manufacturer and the hire of a top notch mechanic.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:27 PM on February 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

Before [more inside] you could read over the front page and get all the information you needed about each post. Now the reader has to leave the front page or open new tabs to know what some of the posts are about. It takes more time now to follow MetaFilter. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's definitely a different experience.

People also complained all the time about giant posts making the front page hard to read, which is partially why posters started the hand-crafted [more inside] things anyway. If anything, I would think that the current setup encourages people to provide more context to a link, while previously there was a sort of informal convention that FPPs needed to be somewhat short. Also, Wikipedia wasn't such a thing back then. IIRC, y2karl received a lot of flak for his posting style back then (link heavy, title tags, etc.).
posted by LionIndex at 3:51 PM on February 11, 2011

Hi, vrakatar!
posted by jason's_planet at 4:30 PM on February 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

Misspellings and dropped are way the heck up, though. I attribute this to smartphone use

That and there used to be a spellchecker.
posted by biffa at 1:25 AM on February 12, 2011

There has never been a MeFi-specific spellchecker.

...unless you're in the Cabal THERE IS NO CABAL.
posted by Kattullus at 1:32 AM on February 12, 2011

Mefi Gold members already have spellcheckers. It's pretty nice.
posted by ardgedee at 7:15 PM on February 12, 2011

...um, so I hear, I mean.
posted by ardgedee at 7:16 PM on February 12, 2011

That 2 minute edit window is sweet.

edit: gramm... no, wait.
posted by Duke999R at 1:27 AM on February 13, 2011