For those who are only interested in the stats, head below the orange thingamabob
May wafted in with the scent of spring,
varying takes on May Day, and the lingering drama of the Bundy ranch, the NRA convention, Sarah Palin, and lots of gun meta. Oh, and
smart guns.
On Monday, May 5, kos asked a simple question. No, there were no meta tags. If there were a way to tag comment threads, though... 1053 comments, 35 recommends, 13,540 votes in the poll. The first comeback diary came out almost exactly 12 hours later, followed almost immediately by a well written "Can't we wait until the mid-terms are over to fight about this?" diary. And then this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and possibly this, spawning this, and this, and possibly this, and this small gem, and this, and this, with the possible last word (this time around) being here on the 10th.
Then came a lull. Well, actually what came was the reconstitution of the Benghazi!!!1! investigation, and if there's a single item that 99% of the users on this site can agree on, it's that Benghazi is the ultimate in both Squirrel! and Squirrel! Food. With minor kerfluffles, this situation continued for several days, followed by a little help from Operation American Spring, another item that drew nearly unanimous opinions from a broad swath of kossacks, and Karl Rove's latest, most insane meanderings on Hilary Clinton.
Alas, the fragile peace was broken, followed by serial Glenn Greenwald diaries, one of which was graced by the gentleman himself.
A totally different stream of thought was kicked off by Hunter's diary on the 16th, responded to by Commonmass, followed by a divergent take by Richard Lyon, and finally (so far), this rant by Cpqemp. The comments run the gauntlet from vastly interesting to barely tolerable, and each of those labels can be applied to a different set of comments depending on where you're coming from. It may not all be tagged meta, but....
On the 23rd, Kos
asked whether the meta level was down. ;)
It isn't meta, but there was certainly pie
flying around the subjects of
GMOs,
pesticides, and Monsanto, and a good start at "Come HR the Trolls" who came flocking in for a discussion of
Men's Rights after a California shooting spree. Other contributors to the subsequent explosion of the topic and
associated issues are
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here, and
here. And
then the
fun really
began. NRA
callouts, thoughtful
responses, and a dollop of
humor.
And another that was neither pie nor meta, but I have to highlight it anyway, from Onomastic. A slight change, the pie was flying quite outrageously after a bit... And here, and here, and again here. And there are more, at least a dozen more ranging all over the map, most well worth reading. Look at a diary listing for 5/29-31, and pick your way down. There's 50-200 hours of available reading over about a three day period, most of it worth taking a look at. I'm sure there will be more, but May has ended and I need to run stats.
Odd stats I've been playing with:
April 3 - May 4, 1:37 am CST: 597 diaries with 100 or more comments. 99 with 300 or more comments, out of 5,073 total for the period.
Daily Kos Staff, Front Page: 789 diaries - 15.6%
The Top 50 diaries (.9%) received 26,937 comments out of 254,026 comments for the same period, or 10.6% of all comments.
HR breakdown, May 1-22 - I'm doing this once and never again unless somebody wants to pay me extravagantly for it.
176,996 comments
Total hidden items (2 or more HRs): 308, 1452 hrs
Note: I'm using "hidden" loosely here - a number of these items, particularly the ones I've called debatable, were not hidden, or not for long, since they have both Recs and HRs.
Total all hr'd items: 456, 1600 hrs (
.26% of all comments were HR'd,
.17% were actually hidden.)
Spam, pure and unsullied: 83 items, 225 hrs: 27% of hidden comments, 15% of hrs
Obvious troll diaries/comments: 51 items, 210 hrs: 17% of hidden comments, 14% of hrs
Spam & Troll HRs: 44% of hidden comments, 29% of HRs
Legitimate HRs
Accusations of Trolling/Shilling: 4 items, 17 hrs
Insults - non debatable: 21 items, 121 hrs
Threats of violence and related idiocy: 15 items, 81 hrs
Gun comments and diaries: 17 items, 145 hrs
DBAD - non debatable: 28 items, 164 hrs
Denigration of religion; Racism; Sexist language; CT; Diary FAIL; Spambot mistake; Just wierd
30 items, 154 hrs
Total: 115 items, 682 HRs: 37% of hidden comments, 47% of HRs
Debatable HRs
Insults - debatable: 13 items, 84 hrs
End-of-an-argument comments (debatable): 4 items, 20 hrs
DBAD - debatable: 22 items, 156 hrs
Disagreement: 20 items, 81 hrs
Total: 59 items, 341 HRs: 19% of hidden comments, 23% of HRs
A couple different factors went into the debatable characterization, the most common being that the comment had both numerous recs and HRs. If I wasn't sure, it went in debatable, mostly because I wasn't going to go back and read all the stuff leading up to the HRs. The whole classification of Disagreement was pretty subjective on my part, so I threw them all into debatable. Some I just didn't trust myself to have an opinion on. H/T to Raptavio for the question, and to Brecht for catching a math error for me.
For the period of 5/1/14 through 5/31/14
Quantcast uniques:
5,800,522
Number of signups:
10,611
Diaries (does not count spam deletes)
By Diary search: 5,090
Diaries by tip jar count: 4,478 (old measure - for comparison and HR percentages)
Avg diaries per day: 164; 1 diary every 8.7 minutes
Diarists: 1,439
Diaries with one or more HRs in the Tip Jar: 60 1.3%
Diaries with 5 or more HRs in the Tip Jar: 21 .47%
Diaries with 5 or more of both Tips and HRs: 8 .18%
Users who published diaries during that period and are now bojo: 74
Comments (includes tip jars, spam, etc., but not necessarily tip jars from deleted diaries) 256,634
Commenters: 8,921
Number of those commenters now bojo:163
Comments with HRs: 743 .29%
1 HR: 235 .09%
2-4 HRs: 306 .12%
5 or more HRs: 202 .08%
5 or more of both HRs and Recs: 26 .01%
Note: Elfling says that the goal is to eventually get to 5% or less of all HRs being debatable. I don't see how any system that's trying to categorize human opinion can ever do it that well, but me 'at's off to 'er for even considering climbing that particular mountain.
Previous stats:
February,
March,
April