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: 1) by NullPtr on Wednesday April 02 2014, @10:03AM
Based on Slashdot, and other high-traffic sites, if you don't get one of the first comments, it's very unlikely you'll get a reply. Does anyone even read stories more than a day or two old? They're just not very good places for ongoing conversations. And apart from Slashdot and now this site, I've completely stopped reading/participating in discussions, because the quality is so low (user - rather than developer - comments, memes, trolling) it's just a waste of my time.
(Score: 1) by datapharmer on Wednesday April 02 2014, @10:27AM
I concur. I am also not surprised that the ratio is so low. I know I ready slashdot for years before even bothering to get a user id and would only rarely comment because either someone else already said it, it was too stale of a story for anyone to even see my comment (especially as anonymous coward), or the conversation had digressed into a crazy rant that had nothing to do with the original topic.
I'm not sure how you fix any of these problems, but I think making an effort at getting anonymous users more involved is well worth taking a stab at. No one wants to put any work into a comment that will never be seen because it is buried at 0 mod points but the long time users don't want to deal with a bunch of spam, hate, or other trolling. I'm not going to suggest how you can handle it, but I can say that slashdot did not handle dealing with troll/spam comments well at all and I can't imagine it would be difficult to do better for your readers/contributors/brethren/audience/cash cows/whatever-you-want-to-call-us.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Wednesday April 02 2014, @12:21PM
On the TODO list. I've got a couple of ideas that may allow AC posts to autofloat up to 1, and be "on par" with regular posts. Keep a look out for the next story on this.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Wednesday April 02 2014, @12:05PM
Comment counts and hit counts suggest that while some users do go after stories once they go off the index, its *not* great. Another place where we're going to have to improve or rethink ...
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 02 2014, @05:58PM
Maybe even just a written policy encouraging people to keep commenting & moderating for a stated amount of time (like 2 days)? e.g.:
At the moment people don't really know how long conversations tend to go on for, unless they pay attention to the comment counts at different times - which I've never done.
Also, possible features to help:
* an actual list of the stories that we're trying to promote activity in. Generally the last 2 days worth, but some could be kicked out of the list early (e.g. if a follow-up story comes along), and some important ones could stay in for longer. Maybe a little 'active' icon (animated gif !) next to the headlines of active stories, wherever headlines appear on the website. They all appear on the front page, even if some at the bottom are only the headlines.
* "remind me about this story in 2 days" tickbox, visible in various places, such as on the comment creation page
* "remind me about this story if it gets this many more comments: " dropdown (1,5,10,20,30). Visible in various places, such as on the comment creation page