A quick look at how Escapist users post
For the longest time, I?ve always had a curiosity regarding the posting habits of Escapist users. I often watch people make threads and endeavour to watch them grow, casually crunching numbers as the posts and views tally up. In December, I arrived at the conclusion, based on hardly any data at all, that the average thread will grow at a pace roughly equivalent to one post for every ten views, give or take the appeal of the thread?s title, the user who made it, the quality of posts therein, etc.
After following this thread [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.115326] for some time and actually feeling bored enough to test my theory, I decided to sit down and find out how close my ?1 post per 10 views? idea was to being correct (keep in mind this theory grew from watching User Review threads and not Off-Topic threads). The results are posted below with my personal observations beneath.
(I made this in Word so as to avoid superfluous forum mark-up nonsense.)
Flimsy and superficial conclusions: Nothing you probably don?t already know. People are more likely to post in simple threads that ask simple questions that don?t demand too much effort on the reader?s behalf. On the flipside of this, somewhat demanding threads still get their dues from likeminded users who are invested in the subject in one way or another.
The most interesting conclusion I find is that the posts-per-view figure is relatively constant regardless of content, title, author, etc. If this sample is to be trusted, every thread gets at least one post for every 9.5 views (The middle of ~5 and ~14). To me, this means that users are largely sold on the topic based on the title alone and not necessarily content. Simply put, if they?re interested, they?ll open the thread, and the odds are one out of every nine or ten people will leave a post. (This can be erroneous though, since someone popping in and out of a thread four times will raise the view count by the same number).
(The above two paragraphs are probably quite redundant.)
This is data collected from Wednesday May 27th at 12:57AM Toronto, Ontario, Canada Time. I took screenshots of my data just in case anyone thinks I made this up and would like to call me out on this.
So, is anyone surprised or enlightened by these results? Granted, it?s pretty flimsy (this only took me an hour to do and I?m only evaluating it at face value? also I?m tired), but I feel it?s a rather accurate representation of how most user?s around here post. Instead of merely complaining about posting habits, I figure I ought to take the liberty of diving in to how the Escapist?s Off-Topic Discussion?s posting mechanics appear to work.
Either way, thanks for taking a gander at this. Please take a moment to share your own thoughts regarding the subject too.
- Maet
(I'm willing to accept that there may be small mistakes in calculations, so point 'em out if you see 'em. Also, I clearly didn't put too much thought into presentation [this really was an "on the fly" type thing] so I apologize if it reads clumsily.)
