Post in a obscure sub
this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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I was playing around with Lemmy statistics the other day, and I decided to take the number of comments per post. Essentially a measure of engagement – the higher the number the more engaging the post is. Or in other words how many people were pissed off enough to comment, or had something they felt like sharing. The average for every single Lemmy instance was 8.208262964 comments per post.
So I modeled that with a Poisson distribution, in stats terms X~Po(8.20826), then found the critical regions assuming that anything that had a less than 5% chance of happening, is important. In other words 5% is the significance level. The critical regions are the region either side of the distribution where the probability of ending up in those regions is less than 5%. These critical regions on the lower tail are, 4 comments and on the upper tail is 13 comments, what this means is that if you get less than 4 comments or more than 13 comments, that's a meaningful value. So I chose to interpret those results as meaning that if you get 5 or less comments than your post is "a bad post", or if you get 13 or more than your post is "a good post". A good post here is litterally just "got a lot of comments than expected of a typical post", vice versa for "a bad post".
You will notice that this is quite rudimentary, like what about when the Americans are asleep, most posts do worse then. That's not accounted for here, because it increases the complexity beyond what I can really handle in a post.
To give you an idea of a more sweeping internet trend, the adage 1% 9% 90%, where 1% do the posting, 9% do the commenting, and 90% are lurkers – assuming each person does an average of 1 thing a day, suggests that c/p should be about 9 for all sites regardless of size.
Now what is more interesting is that comments per post varies by instance, lemmy.world for example has an engagement of 9.5 c/p and lemmy.ml has 4.8 c/p, this means that a “good post” on .ml is a post that gets 9 comments, whilst a “good post” on .world has to get 15 comments. On hexbear.net, you need 20 comments, to be a “good post”. I got the numbers for instance level comments and posts from here
This is a little bit silly, since a “good post”, by this metric, is really just a post that baits lots and lots of engagement, specifically in the form of comments – so if you are reading this you should comment, otherwise you are an awful person. No matter how meaningless the comment.
Anyway I thought that was cool.
EDIT: I've cleared up a lot of the wording and tried to make it clearer as to what I am actually doing.
Cool !
Now what is more interesting is that comments per post varies by instance, lemmy.world for example has an engagement of 9.5 c/p and lemmy.ml has 4.8 c/p
I don't understand what this is supposed to mean. The commenter's account, or the community they posted to is on .world/.ml? Because those aren't necessarily the same.
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Thank a lot for sharing this with us, i love those data :)
Your correct use of the plural makes me oddly uncomfortable.
Thank you for your insights.
does this have anything to do with the girl in the picture? or is this just "GIIIIIRLLL!!!" moment?
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I guess those without ego stroking don't care.
If average comments/post is lowest on .ml, medium on .world and highest on hexbear, it might correlate those instances with post meaningfulness, or with the innate tendency of their users to comment. Or with both, or some other thing entirely. All I can really say about it is, "Huh, interesting." Not interesting because it leads to any particular conclusion, but interesting that there's a pattern.
I'm a bit confused but I think I liked this post
Any details you could share about how you obtained and processed the data? It seems like there's a lot of interesting things that could be done with this but I'm not sure where the best place to start would be
I disagree that commenting for the sake of commenting is a good idea. Quality over quantity, a single meaningful discussion is superior to a sea of low effort garbage. I also want the fediverse to take off, but not at the cost of adopting modern Reddit culture.
a “good post”, by this metric, is really just a post that baits lots and lots of engagement
Baiting anything is bad.
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You know, I'm really just waiting for the day voyager supports gif insertion.
I sometimes comment, just for the sake of comment and to support this community. For example now.
Your post is good!
I feel like we shouldn't do that or stray off on a tangent, like commenting about comments.
Yes, or even continuing such discussions for no apparent reason, but to feel a bit of the normal human interaction... Or to have fun playing some meta together :3
Oof. That would be problematic for sure. I'm glad we're cooperating to oppose that kind of nonsense.
At this depth, I consider you a friend, however you are :) Thank you for the good time!
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It makes sense that it would be highly dependent on comments because for one, Lemmy's default filter is activity based so the more activity a new post has, the higher it will rank, until displaced by a newer post. The second part is that if there aren't any comments there people might be less likely to leave comments and the post is more likely to do poorly as it'll get bumped down by posts with higher activity. Obviously not everyone uses the activity sort feature, some sort by new, top, or scaled, but since activity is the default most will use that. Especially since it shows posts with the most discussion and activity, the ones most likely to find other people interacting on.
I follow instructions, I think. Good post