MetaTalk

The biggest change in the way that mefites participate on the blue in years has been the rise of US politics megathreads. We have had several discussions of the qualitative impact of them, but it occurred to me that it might be useful to dig into the infodump and see what quantitative picture might emerge. I think my findings are worth sharing - while a quantitative analysis on its own can't tell us whether the megathreads are a good thing or not, there are several negative trends regarding community engagement and participation that are happening in close concurrency with the rise of the megathreads. [more inside]
posted by strangely stunted trees on Mar 27, 2017 - 435 comments

Back in January, on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, I set up an election prediction contest for you fine folks, and got 74 ballots in response. Nearly ten months (and ten million comments) later, the results are in: congratulations to Cash4Lead, for his remarkably far-sighted prediction of the winners of Iowa, New Hampshire, Super Tuesday, the nominations, the House majority, and even Clinton's VP pick! A $50 donation to the charity of your choice is yours. Oodles more analysis of the collective wisdom inside [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi on Nov 20, 2016 - 14 comments

Here is a collection of graphics about the evolution of user engagement (posting, commenting) on the Blue (data from the infodump, 15 June 2015). [more inside]
posted by elgilito on Jun 29, 2015 - 466 comments

If one is a habitué of AskMe who devotes himself more to satisfying his own curiosity than resolving the problems facing his fellows, one is apt to find, among the ranks of those who are more helpful, that some among us dispose over a sufficiently wide-ranging expertise, or all-encompassing benevolence, that their names recur with a frequency so apparently noticeable that one's thoughts are naturally led to the question of whether the said frequency is merely apparent or is in fact real, a question to be settled not by the comparison of anecdotes and impressions, prey as all such are to the biases afflicting all finite creatures, but by the totting up and comparison of figures, which, though they be in one manner of speaking finite, admit of another view on which Plato's placement of them in the heavens, rather than under the changeable moon with ourselves, quite appropriate—and which makes it fortunate that cortex placed several useful figures in the clouds if not the heavens, so that the curious can indeed determine who the answeringest mefites are, considering the "answeringness" of a mefite to be the ratio of the number of distinct questions posted to "the green" to which the mefite has submitted at least one answer, to the total number of distinct questions posted to "the green" following the first question the said mefite answered, that question marking the mefite's first becoming active on AskMe, and excluding, as apt to be uninformative, those participants of AskMe whose first answer was posted within the last six months. [more inside]
posted by kenko on Mar 27, 2015 - 180 comments

AskMe often receives questions of the "Can I Eat This?" variety. It would be nice if, when these were marked resolved, the OP was able to indicate whether they had, after all, eaten it, and if so, record what happened (presumably they didn't die, or they wouldn't be around to mark it resolved). My preference would be a little button and a field, with some way of tabulating the results, but it could be just a suggestion included in the "resolve" letter. [more inside]
posted by ubiquity on Mar 9, 2015 - 44 comments

I was reading the John Carmack FPP and suddenly became aware that pretty much everyone who had left comments in that thread was male. So I made a very rough tally, which shows that of the 39 unique users who left comments, only one user explicitly specified "female" in their MeFi profile. On a hunch, I went back to the recent Spelunky thread and made the same tally. I came up with 33 unique users, of whom two specify "female" in their profile. Obviously, everyone is free to specify anything (or nothing), but it still strikes as a little lopsided. [more inside]
posted by Nomyte on Nov 24, 2013 - 402 comments

After many years of service, jaden is no longer be maintaining his wonderful Mefi Contribution index. Results will now be frozen at mid-August. Thanks for running it for as long as you did, jaden!
posted by zarq on Sep 8, 2013 - 71 comments

Has anyone done research into the ideal day/time to post something to our beloved collection of multi-colored subsites? i.e. the most statistically probable time to get the maximum number of responses?
posted by softlord on Jun 9, 2013 - 19 comments

Some 2012 datawankery, courtesy of the infodumpster.... [more inside]
posted by zarq on Jan 4, 2013 - 117 comments

This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments. We have a new MeFi record! 8185 total comments. [more inside]
posted by zarq on Dec 6, 2012 - 91 comments

What percentage of FPP links get clicked?
posted by Trurl on Dec 22, 2011 - 56 comments

An Infodump Question™ and followup to this post: What is the average number of favorites per post received for each of the various MeFi subsites? Per comment? Average number of favorites given and received for the userbase?
posted by zarq on Dec 13, 2011 - 23 comments

December best post contest - stats related question. [more inside]
posted by allkindsoftime on Dec 5, 2011 - 32 comments

How much use does MeFi Jobs get? [more inside]
posted by tylerkaraszewski on Oct 10, 2011 - 44 comments

What if there was a section of the site dedicated to research projects related to MetaFilter? [more inside]
posted by codacorolla on May 1, 2011 - 13 comments

While I'm not a fan of the plethora of infographics available online these days (and lame SEO attempts to capitalize on them), I decided to make a tongue-in-cheek infographic for MetaFilter, and as everyone behind the scenes at Team MeFi scrambled in the last week to gather up all the interesting statistics we could, I threw it all into photoshop to produce this: The 2010 Year In MetaFilter Infographic. Enjoy!
posted by mathowie on Jan 3, 2011 - 142 comments

Infodump fun with the fabulous Fishbike! [more inside]
posted by new brand day on Jul 14, 2010 - 127 comments

As a follow up to this post on Lucia De Berk: she has (finally) had her conviction overturned, a conviction based in part on bad statistics. Ben Goldacre's follow-up summarises the case and also features two of the opposing expert witnesses going at it in the comments.
posted by Hartster on Apr 14, 2010 - 10 comments

I'm curious. How many countries/nationalities are represented on Metafilter? [more inside]
posted by jonesor on Jan 26, 2010 - 159 comments

The big four-oh, this podcast features recaps from around the site for the last three weeks. It was recorded on April 17th and runs about an hour and ten minutes. [more inside]
posted by mathowie on Apr 21, 2009 - 36 comments

Does anybody here have a WhatPulse profile? Would anyone be interested in a MeFi team? [more inside]
posted by Phire on Mar 11, 2009 - 30 comments

By request, I updated my Metafilter Stats for the first time in two years. User growth, Top 20 lists, and daily stats are all current, as of last week. [more inside]
posted by waxpancake on Mar 6, 2009 - 34 comments

I'm assuming this got lost in the Great Server Disaster of 2009, but is the Infodump ever coming back?
posted by desjardins on Feb 17, 2009 - 24 comments

The side-discussion about Macs here has made me curious about the % of mac users here as indicated by the mefi.com server logs. Can I get some user agent statistics?
posted by troy on Sep 6, 2008 - 75 comments

Which post has been the most "removed from favorites"? I don't think this is answerable from the data dump.
posted by smackfu on Aug 5, 2008 - 129 comments

This AskMe thread about contributors vs. lurkers reminded me of something I've been meaning to inquire about. A pony named Argus, who sees all users, named and unnamed, and enumerates them with well-manicured hooves. A digital Clever Hans. Or a realtime visitor count, if you prefer. [more inside]
posted by mumkin on Mar 23, 2008 - 25 comments

Nerds, start your engines: it's the new Metafilter Infodump. [more inside]
posted by cortex on Jan 22, 2008 - 271 comments

What percentage of users post answers, under their 'real' account, in their own anonymous askmefi threads? [more inside]
posted by oxford blue on Jan 12, 2008 - 67 comments

The shadowy back alleys of MetaFilter... [more inside]
posted by carsonb on Jan 12, 2008 - 122 comments

Request for an interesting statistic about MeFi make up... [more inside]
posted by fcummins on Dec 2, 2007 - 30 comments

As part of my final paper for a grad class, I wanted to ask the hivemind a few questions. It's just 20 quick questions about MetaFilter and AskMetaFilter, since those are the two most active parts of this community. I had to break it up into two parts since I'm a poor grad student and don't want to drop $20 for one survey: Part One Part Two It's also limited to the first 100 responses, but if even get close to 100 responses I'll be extremely happy. Thanks in advance! [more inside]
posted by lovetragedy on Nov 26, 2007 - 167 comments

I'm an avid reader of Puke & Cry's Deleted Thread blog, and it got me wondering: Do any of the admins have stats on the most posts deleted in one day? Or, the most doubles (i.e. the most posts on one topic that were deleted - I'm guessing it must be an obituary post, maybe James Brown)? Or, the longest time span without a deletion? Etc.
posted by amyms on Oct 30, 2007 - 22 comments

We used PieSpy to visualize the social structure of #mefi. Here's an animation of the last ten days.
posted by dmd on Sep 13, 2007 - 41 comments

Someone went and implemented xkcd's internet map - it generates pictures like this. Matt, would you be willing to dump a couple days worth of access_log IPs into this tool?
posted by dmd on Sep 4, 2007 - 62 comments

I know MetaFilter isn't a popularity contest, but just in case, I thought it'd be interesting to gather some stats on what percentage of certain users' posts/comments are favorited. Here is a completely unscientific sample.
posted by desjardins on Aug 14, 2007 - 346 comments

Fantasy feature: hover over "x users marked this as a favorite" and see the names of the people who did the favorite marking. Whaddaya think?
posted by serazin on Jun 13, 2007 - 51 comments

I was wondering how feasible a few adds on for people who post threads would be. I was thinking would it be possible for the OP to be able to see stats like how many people viewed the full thread and how many clicked on the different links? it would give a fairly good idea of how much interest a post generated, over and above what you can see from the number of favourites, etc.
posted by criticalbill on Jun 11, 2007 - 37 comments

It'd be kind of awesome if we could see, in some generic way like "hits", how many looks our MeJobs job postings have gotten.
posted by scrump on May 18, 2007 - 9 comments

Since apparently MeFi users want a way to rank each other, here's an easy way to do it. You take one of your posts, and a tag from that post. Then, you find out how many google hits the tag generates vs. the number of times it is used as a tag in MetaFilter. The winner is the person who has the highest google-hit to MeFi tag ratio.
posted by Deathalicious on May 7, 2007 - 18 comments

What's the percentage of MeFites who have no one nearby? I just moved away from Vancouver (in the interior, Quesnel, to operate my hosting/computer services biz where I actually WANT to live) and suddenly, after updating my long. and lat., I'm all alone!
posted by Kickstart70 on Mar 14, 2007 - 147 comments

Is someone compiling/has someone already compiled statistics such as: the average number of favorites per post, the average number of comments per post, comment quantity by time posted, average number of favorited posts by user, etc? I assume this has been discussed here in meta previously, but I couldn't find it in searching. Feel free to direct me to old threads on this topic though.
posted by serazin on Feb 1, 2007 - 40 comments

Post-specific summary statistics. [mi]
posted by Saucy Intruder on Jan 9, 2007 - 32 comments

Would MetaFilter consider sharing detailed Public Traffic Stats?

This appears to be the strong trend among the top Technoratti Blogs - and SEO blogs.

http://seoptimization.blog.com/1221628/

It would be fascinating to view and discusse where new users are coming from.
What post attract search engine traffic & keywords
What geo-locations are sending viewers during a given time

In previous years there were very general stats showing growth - But something more intriguing could be considered
posted by Bodyguard on Jan 8, 2007 - 37 comments

In which I post a bunch of meaningless statistics in the hope of sparking a more meaningful discussion than this one.
posted by tkolar on Jan 4, 2007 - 142 comments

Matt, can I have a pony for Christmas? Nothing too fancy, just some public statistics. Boingboing, for example, uses AWStats, which provides a delicious smörgåsbord of information. It doesn't sound too difficult to use, I've set up similar things on sites of my own.
posted by Spike on Dec 23, 2006 - 33 comments

Is there a ranking somewhere of who has had the most comments or posts favorited?
posted by empath on Nov 2, 2006 - 53 comments

What percentage of mefites actually contribute to metatalk? And how popular is ask.me in comparison to the blue?
posted by roofus on Sep 20, 2006 - 54 comments

Ever wondered which sites Metafilter users link to the most? I've updated Metafilter Sources for the first time in two years, showing that Youtube and Flickr are now in the top 20, and that Wikipedia is now the most popular external source ever. Move over, Newsfilter... It's Wikifilter time!

Also, I updated the Metafilter Stats charts through June 2006. More analysis inside.
posted by waxpancake on Jul 24, 2006 - 40 comments

Here are two charts about metafilter. Posts and user numbers and comments and user numbers. Each dot represents a post (or comment), with the post number and number of the user who posted (or commented) as the xy data. I don't remember what prompted me to make these (some metatalk thread, I'm sure), but I found them again on my hard drive and thought someone else might find them interesting (I brought them back up to date, too). There are half a dozen interesting little milestones that show up in the graphs, more than I could see probably.
posted by Lirp on Jun 22, 2006 - 64 comments

Curious - what happened approximately 3 months ago that doubled the daily reach of metafilter, according to this graphic?
posted by jonson on Jun 21, 2006 - 20 comments