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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 02 2014, @10:21AM
That seemed to be the magic of /., they had millions of users so actually one in a thousand was enough to add up. Like web advertising.
so in other words with about 5k users vs a million or even 500k we're doing about a sixth of their volume? 1000x users and only 6x comments? If this can keep up this place will be the most dense commentary site in the world!
Any comments?
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Wednesday April 02 2014, @11:30AM
I strongly suspect the ratio is far far worse than that. I chose 5 per poster because it seems like a sane ballpark figure, but on closer inspection, you've got people who post like crazy regularly, then the occassional drive by. If the average active poster on there is closer to 20 or 30 a month (one a day), then the numbers slide by a factor of 10.
Still always moving