Kudos to Besame for her recent threads encouraging DK users to share the stories behind their usernames! By a curious coincidence, I’ve been compiling some stats on a random sample of DK users that I thought I might share.
Methodology — I looked up the user profiles of 100 unique non-staff DK users who posted a diary on May 14 thru the first half of May 15 to ascertain:
- Year joined
- Total Diaries
- Total Comments
- Total Recommends
- Total Followers
With these basic stats, I then divided the entire sample into 4 subgroups based on the year joined and calculated the median values for each of these stats for each subgroup — along with per year estimates of each, and a couple of compound stats (Comments per Diary and Recommends per Comment):
DK User Stats May 14-15 (Median Values)
Year
Joined
|
2003-
2006
|
2007-
2011
|
2012-
2016
|
2017-
2021
|
Tot Users |
Diaries |
Diaries/Yr |
Coms |
Coms/Yr |
Recs |
Recs/Yr |
Followers |
Followers/Yr |
Coms/Diary |
Recs/Com |
|
23 |
476 |
30 |
13,176 |
778 |
8,227 |
493 |
95 |
6 |
28.3 |
0.58 |
|
27 |
302 |
23 |
11,928 |
1,147 |
5,827 |
435 |
85 |
8 |
21.1 |
0.45 |
|
29 |
110 |
18 |
1,418 |
222 |
590 |
80 |
30 |
4 |
14.1 |
0.20 |
|
21 |
17 |
12 |
537 |
122 |
8 |
2 |
3 |
2 |
4.5 |
0.04 |
|
As would probably be expected, those who have been on Daily Kos the longest have generally posted the most Diaries and Comments (both in absolute numbers, and on a per year basis) while racking up the most Recs and Followers.
The one exception is that those in the second cohort (joined 2007-11) have managed to post considerably more Comments per year and acquire a few more Followers per year than those in the first cohort (2003-06).
The other most noticeable difference is the significant drop-off in Comments per year, and the even larger drop-off in Recs per year among the later cohorts — which suggests the criteria for accumulating Recs has actually changed considerably over time. Independent of this, I’ve also noticed that a few of the most prolific and popular Diarists with some of the largest number of Followers have ‘0’ total Recs in their profiles, so there is clearly some other criteria at work here that I don’t quite comprehend yet.