Slashdot, a user-generated news, analysis, peer question and professional insight community. Tech professionals moderate the site which averages more than 5,300 comments daily and 3.7 million unique visitors each month.
As I said before, we don't have a really good idea on the number of unique IPIDs visiting the site, but we do have solid numbers for our daily comment counts. Here's the graph as generated by slashcode for a biweekly period:
(due to a quirk in slashcode, the graphs don't update until 48 hours later; our comment count for 04/01 was 712 comments total).
Taking in account averages, we're roughly getting a little less than 10% of Slashdot's comment counts, with a considerably smaller user base. As I said, the OkCupid story made me take notice. Here's the comment counts at various scores between the two sites
| SoylentNews | Slashdot.org | --------------------------------------- Score -1 | 130 | 1017 | Score 0 | 130 | 1005 | Score 1 | 109 | 696 | Score 2 | 74 | 586 | Score 3 | 12 | 96 | Score 4 | 4 | 64 | Score 5 | 1 | 46 | ---------------------------------------Furthermore, I took a look at UIDs on the other site, the vast majority of comments came from 6/7 digit UID posters. Looking at CmdrTaco's Retirement Post as well as posts detailing the history of the other site most of the low UIDs are still around, and are simply in perma-lurk mode.
(Score: 2) by JeanCroix on Wednesday April 02 2014, @02:57PM
I'm a high 5-digit UID on the other site; I probably registered there sometime around '99. My slide toward passivity came from a few things, I think; several of which have already been discussed by others:
1) Sheer volume: I didn't have time to wade through the hundreds of comments already posted to see if someone had already made the point I wanted to raise. I even resorted to keyword searches at times.
2) Sheer volume, part 2: Even if I did have and post a unique point, it felt like my voice generally got lost in the noise.
3) Derailment: I'd actually post a unique point, and someone would come along and fixate on a tiny detail of it which was tangential to the real topic, completely taking the discussion far down the wrong rabbit hole. This was done using a lot of strawmen and ad-hominem tactics, usually.
I'm sure there are more that I'm not thinking of. But I'm already thinking this post will be somewhat lost in the sheer volume, heh.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Wednesday April 02 2014, @04:21PM
It's not. I'm reading everyone one of these posts, and as soon as this migraine goes away, I'm going to try and personally reply to all of them as well.
Still always moving