I was asked recently if I could update the merit per post ratios that I calculated back in July 2018 (see Bitcointalk – Posts per Day - evolution during past six months, specifically section 4), hence this post.
In order to calculate the data, I’ve taken what I had already calculated back then, and added an additional 4 months of data (covering now in total from the 23/01/2018 up to the 22/11/2018).
The merits per interval are calculated from the cumulative of merit.txt files, and the scraped info that allows me to derive the section/subsection. The number of posts is obtained from the official forum statistics snapshots, found on archive websites.
Notes:
- Selected dates try to be one month apart from each other (depending on archived available info).
- Average merit post ratios per section/subsection vary over the months, sometimes pretty wildly from one month to another. There are multiple factors that influence this fact such as the number of posts created in the period (being on a descending trend for months), The increase on Merit Source total aggregate pool, etc.
- Deleted posts (sometimes in mass) and moved threads influence the ratios. For example, the Mining board number of posts decreased substantially between January and March 2018, leading to a negative merit per post ratio.
- Post count includes all child boards within subsection. This means that local boards aggregate for example bitcoin discussion with Ann altcoin posts in the same counter. Taking this down one more level is very cumbersome, and is not something I wish to do (I did it once for my local board and that’s about it).
- Smaller boards have easier merit/post ratio swings from one month to another.
2. Merit per post
The merit per post table I’ve created over a 10 month period (23/01/2018 up to the 22/11/2018), allows us to see the evolution of this ratio over months per section/subsection. Since the table is pretty big, I’ve place it on an external google spreadsheet document (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cj7zosB91OE_K6SzdmjV9PtBE1Vij1k_wZsok85mXVU/edit?usp=sharing), and only summarized the recent months on the screenshot shown below:
Things that stand-out:
- The highest merit/post ratios are (looking over 10 months): 0,566 (Development & Technical Discussion), 0,413 (Serious discussion) and 0,316 (Meta).
- The current highest merit/post ratios are (23/10/2018..22/11/2018): 0,8 (Serious discussion), 0,519 (Development & Technical Discussion) and 0,426 (Mining).
- The best ratios for a Local Board are (looking over 10 months): 0,114 (German), 0,113 (Croatian) and 0,075 (French).
- The current best ratios for a Local Board are (23/10/2018..22/11/2018): 0,426 (Japanese), 0,244 (Italian) and 0,231 (German
- The lesser ratios are occupied by some of the Altcoin boards: Altcoin Discussion, Speculation (Altcoins), Marketplace (Altcoins).
- Negative ratios have been explained above (caused by mass deletion or movements of posts).
The above is good enough to get a general idea, but ratios on a given section/subsection have likely underlying reasons which are not analysed here, and that would require an exceedingly amount of work to try to derive.