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 LordFrito on Wednesday April 02 2014, @06:48PM
Exactly! Skin in the game is exactly what I'm talking about.
Totally free discussion with no barrier to entry leads to lowest common denominator discussion - think writing on bar bathroom walls. The trolls ruin it for everyone. Unfortunately it's in our nature, check out this link http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/c limate_desk/2014/02/internet_troll_personality_stu dy_machiavellianism_narcissism_psychopathy.html [slate.com]
Now if I owned (or was part owner of) those walls, I'd have a lot more motivation to make sure the walls stayed clean and useful. Not having skin in the game is one post-modern societies biggest problems.
Like all things in life, going to far in the opposite direction doesn't help either. Hopefully we get it together before too long.