MetaTalk

Okay, someone made a (possibly throwaway) comment in one of the POTUS45 threads that it would be interesting to see how the comments/content of the threads had changed since the election. I got my teeth into that, and after some playing with the HTML of the threads with VBA and Access, I now have a headache. As well as that I've got a database with 48 threads, 139,882 comments (including the posts themselves as a comment), 9,230,306 words, 2,193,898 favourites and 46,692 links. Some charts and stats inside. Let me know if there's other stuff you're interested in. [more inside]
posted by MattWPBS on Sep 1, 2017 - 103 comments

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

After too long a wait, here are some initial results from The Big MetaFilter Survey 2015.
What We Talk About When We Talk About MetaFilter - information about your interactions with the site.
Tell Us A Little About Yourself - information about the personal lives of your fellow users.
The Food Wars - what kinds of foods are acceptable and what kinds are garbage nightmares.
Other Results [pdf] - includes curated responses to the more interesting open-ended questions and some other numerical data. [more inside]
posted by Rock Steady on Dec 9, 2015 - 358 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

MetaFilter "Political Compass" Survey, 2011 Edition [more inside]
posted by Salvor Hardin on May 5, 2011 - 201 comments

Metafilter's comments are better than Youtube's. Now with graphs. [more inside]
posted by fightorflight on Sep 29, 2009 - 54 comments

This is the best write-up of what's wrong with metafilter to date. Especially the graphs and illustrations. Fine work, mr. edrants.
posted by mathowie on Feb 26, 2002 - 33 comments

I wanted to see how Metafilter has grown since its launch, so I crawled the archives for thread/comment totals for every day since July 1999. Then, I wrote a script to plot all the data in line graphs and tables. Click on the links to drill down.

It's interesting to see how quickly the commenting community have grown. At this rate, Matt will have to build thread-within-thread support to handle the sheer number of comments.
posted by waxpancake on Jan 12, 2001 - 16 comments