Analysis – A quick glance at the current Custom Trust Networks

1. Introduction.

It’s a rather dull and rainy day where I live, so contrary to the household spirit of what can be done on such a day, I’ve grabbed my laptop to take a look into something I was curious about. In the light of the forum encouragement for us to build our Custom Trust Network, I’m keeping track of how these are evolving.

So far, we’ve got:

Quote from: DdmrDdmr on January 19, 2019, 01:12:05 AM

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Code:

Date                Trust/Dist. rel.    Trust rel.          Distrust rel.       Customized Lists    Distinct Trusted/Untrusted[b]
19/01/2019          25387               21811               3576                4052                8662
12/01/2019          23800               20720               3080                3957                8498
05/01/2019          22605               19637               2968                3891                8527

That is an additional 95 customized lists this week (rather a small amount), 1091 Trust relations and 596 net Distrust relations.

2. Custom Trust Lists by Rank.

The breakdown of the existing Custom Trust List by rank is as follows:

Truster:

Code:

nfromRank           nUsers              %
VIP                 8                   0,20%
Donator             16                  0,39%
Administrator       2                   0,05%
Global Moderator    2                   0,05%
Staff               16                  0,39%
Legendary           514                 12,69%
Hero Member         483                 11,92%
Sr. Member          665                 16,41%
Full Member         664                 16,39%
Member              549                 13,55%
Jr. Member          84                  2,07%
Newbie              1016                25,07%
Copper Member       25                  0,62%
(non derived)       8                   0,20%

Total               4052                100,00%

The profiles are derived from my weekly merited scraped profiles and @Piggy’s latest full database dumps (early December 2018). Therefore, some profiles may have ranked-up in the meantime. The “non-derived” are some I need to look into (they do not match when crossing data due to character issues in different codepages). The Copper Members are those that are derived from @Piggy’s dataset, and that I have not tried to derive their core rank (I do on the merited profiles).

The weird thing that stands out is the amount of Newbie accounts with a Customized Trust Network. I manually checked some of them and they are still Newbies. It does not mean that they are recently created Newbies, and we can see that somewhat further down.

Trusted/untrusted:

Code:

nToRank             nUsers              %
Founder             1                   0,01%
VIP                 17                  0,20%
Donator             45                  0,52%
Administrator       2                   0,02%
Global Moderator    3                   0,03%
Staff               23                  0,27%
Legendary           1124                12,98%
Hero Member         1117                12,90%
Sr. Member          1435                16,57%
Full Member         1341                15,48%
Jr. Member          164                 1,89%
Member              1026                11,84%
Newbie              2246                25,93%
Copper Member       105                 1,21%
(non derived)       13                  0,15%

Total               8662                100,00%

Here again, the Newbie segment stands out weirdly.

3. Custom Trust Lists by Date of last active.

The profile date of last active could well be a good indicator as to whether the Custom Trust Lists are recent or old. Here I’m deriving last active in the same way as rank (so it could be off by a month at most in the worst case, being therefore not exact).

Code:

yearLastActive      LastActiveQ             nUsers
2019                Q1                   529
2018                Q4                   330
2018                Q3                   1267
2018                Q2                   434
2018                Q1                   324
2017                Q4                   100
2017                Q3                   215
2017                Q2                   126
2017                Q1                   67
2016                Q4                   17
2016                Q3                   64
2016                Q2                   56
2016                Q1                   67
2015                Q4                   25
2015                Q3                   50
2015                Q2                   110
2015                Q1                   47
2014                Q4                   16
2014                Q3                   84
2014                Q2                   63
2014                Q1                   25
2013                Q4                   7
2013                Q3                   18
2013                Q2                   3
(non derived)       Q                    8

Total                                    4052

Ok, this is interesting. Only a small fraction seems to have a recent (2019 Q1) last activity date on their profile. What I derive from that is than the vast majority of existing Custom Trust Lists have not been update recently (nor are the owners of the list actually online recently).

I’ve gone and checked the above shown Newbies with a Custom Trust List

Code:

yearLastActive      LastActiveQ    nUsers
2019                Q1                   6
2018                Q4                   65
2018                Q3                   259
2018                Q2                   115
2018                Q1                   102
2017                Q4                   21
2017                Q3                   77
2017                Q2                   44
2017                Q1                   24
2016                Q4                   4
2016                Q3                   24
2016                Q2                   18
2016                Q1                   23
2015                Q4                   19
2015                Q3                   20
2015                Q2                   58
2015                Q1                   17
2014                Q4                   11
2014                Q3                   42
2014                Q2                   36
2014                Q1                   11
2013                Q4                   7
2013                Q3                   11
2013                Q2                   2

Total                                    1016

4. Custom Trust Lists by size.

Here I’ve tried to see how many forum members are actually included in a Custom Trust List (either trusted or untrusted) by groups:

Code:

nTrustSize          nCases              %
>10                 553                 13,65%
10                  58                  1,43%
9                   93                  2,30%
8                   85                  2,10%
7                   101                 2,49%
6                   134                 3,31%
5                   144                 3,55%
4                   283                 6,98%
3                   404                 9,97%
2                   590                 14,56%
1                   1607                39,66%

Total               4052                100,00%

Ok, so 64,19% of Custom Trust Lists have between 1 and 3 trusted or untrusted members; rather small. Likely the trust scores on that those profiles will see are rather limited (the complete feedback will be there to see though).

We could go further on (do this table by number of Trust and Distrust relations, cross by rank, etc.), but with all the above I think we get a general idea how Custom Trust Networks look right now.

5. Additional stuff

Additionally, we can play around with:
Link to the Personal Trust Network.
Link to the Base File (Data to load the Personal Trust Network (first tab) + Summary per user (second tab -> interesting to see most trusted/distrusted and so on)).

Topic: Analysis – A quick glance at the current Custom Trust Networks (Read 205 times)