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When was the "views" information added to the boards? I ask because I think they rock! They can be used to test a widely held view: 20% of the people do 80% of the work.
This is, of course, a generalization, but with the posts and views numbers, you can test something close to it. I looked at only the posts that had been changed as of todat (18 December 2000) and recorded the number of posts and number of views. posts/views= fraction of people "doing work". You can do the math but here it is:
.319, .317, .200, .174, .465, .243
The average comes out to be about 0.286. So on the EV Developers Board 28.6% of the people reading posts reply. This value will change, of course. The only way to get a "real" value is to wait a week or so for topics to retire to page two, then look at the numbers. Not quite x% people doing y% work, but still, I think it's interesting. The only way to test the 20% people/80% work would be to generate a list of the people who post most often and the total number of posts. My guess is that 70 to 80% of the posts would be made by 20 to 30% of the people.
What does this have to do with with EV at all? Well, in a Nova post I mentioned some papers coorelating neocortex size with effective group size, and my own observations that an organism's generation time/life span=social structure (where 0=ideal folck and *1 is an ideal hive). Post-industrial humans end up with a social fraction around 0.313, which is very close to the average level of interaction on this EV Board.
Again, what does this have to do with EV? Nothing directly. Just wanted to share a EV community observation and tie it into some sketchy biological modeling.
-STH
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(This message has been edited by seant (edited 12-18-2000).)
From the look of it, it only counts your view once (like how you cant rate a plugin again and again becuase it recignizes your IP), thus, you should not be counting posts, but poeple (e.g. 10 poeple view it 2 poeple post several times) am i right? (knowing myself, probably not :p)
Interesting idea.
However, one reason for few people making posts is that someone who responds to every single post is sometimes seen as a spammer, unless they can think up something intelligent to contribute to all the conversations. A lot of people deliberately cut down on the number of posts they make, to keep down the noise.
Although the numbers may seem to match up, I can't say that I necessarily agree with your conclusion. If you do some further analysis and find otherwise, tell me - it sounds fascinating.
------------------ The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
Here's to the crazy ones.
Another factor to consider, is even now, there are threads that were started before the new view column was put up, and they received many views before hand which didn't get added into. So if you take only the topics started after the new feature was added, not just modified, then your number may be more accurate, if accurate at all.
Chamrin
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Originally posted by Chamrin: Another factor to consider, is even now, there are threads that were started before the new view column was put up, and they received many views before hand which didn't get added into. So if you take only the topics started after the new feature was added, not just modified, then your number may be more accurate, if accurate at all.
Something else I noticed are the existance of high and low reply topics. Topics that only require an opinion, such as "look at this ship I made. Cool, huh?" get nearly 100% views and replies. Topics that are more essoteric (?sp?), such as this one, receive an average view but a low number of posts, taking them near zero.
I guess what I'm saying is that the posts/views is a good indicator of how good a given topic is. close to 1 and everyone can understand and has something to say (not necessarily desirable). Close to 0 and either no one gets it, or no one cares. When you start getting an average of aroun 0.3, you get informative discussions. To generalize, most of the "problem with plug-in" posts seem to come near 0.3
Guess that's it. I'm not going to beat this any longer. At least not until the views function has been around for a while and I can see better data.
Originally posted by Chrestomanci: **Although the numbers may seem to match up, I can't say that I necessarily agree with your conclusion. If you do some further analysis and find otherwise, tell me - it sounds fascinating. **
I took things a little further and looked at a server a friend ownes. Several people have accounts on it, but only two people take care of the software and hardware. I hypothesized that the ratio of people doing work would be between 0.2 and 0.3 (20% rule and .3 value I calculated for humans). I had my two workers but needed the total population size.
After going over the log for the computer, I found that 12 people had used the computer since 1 Dec (the start of the log). Two of those people logged in only once and were discarded from the population (I used the rule that if #log-ins/#days<0.1, discard it).
Anyway, 2/10=0.2, putting it right in line with the lower end of my prediction. Of course I need to wait until the end of the month to get more data on who is using the computer how often, but it's still interesting.
As I was reading this thread I thought of several things to contribute, but I politely read the all the posts. Even though I had done the work, I never posted to avoid cluttering the board with repetitive information.
------------------ Signed, Brian Schack "DOS Computers, manufactured by millions of companies, are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use worldwide. Macintosh fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form." --The New York Times, November 26, 1991 (also quoted in MacAddict 4)
The majority of people who use a particular product (say, a game like Escape Velocity) do not even read the web boards. The majority of people who do read the web boards do not post to them (or rarely post to them).
This information is something I've been aware of for some time, and greatly influenced how the web boards were designed and set up.
------------------ Andrew Welch / el Presidente / Ambrosia Software, Inc. (url="http://"http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/~andrew/")http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/~andrew/(/url) | "Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him."
Paul Eldridge
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Originally posted by andrew: **The majority of people who use a particular product (say, a game like Escape Velocity) do not even read the web boards. The majority of people who do read the web boards do not post to them (or rarely post to them). **
By majority, do you mean, oh, 70 to 80%?
I'm curious: does Ambrosia have any estimate of how many people register products vs people who just keep using unregistered products. I suppose you could keep track of number of downloads, but someone could download something multiple times because of a crash or whatever. Others might not like the product and delete it. So I guess # of downloads would be a bad judge. Anyway, can any numbers be offered?