(no subject)

[learnedax]

It has been said several times that I seem to post quite rarely to LJ (for someone who actually uses his journal), and wondering if that's true I did a quick sanity check on the numbers. In five years I've averaged 2.5 days between posts. Amongst people I consider very active users, 1.5-2.5 days seems to be the typical range, with a small set way over (like jpicon with 2.6 posts per day), but not necessarily with a corresponding perception of increase in usage.

So, open-endedly, with perhaps some sort of poll to come once I've isolated the key factors, what do you think drives your perception of usage? Volume of posts? Length of posts? Consistency of posting (I for instance seem to have large variance between peaks of activity and valleys of not using LJ much at all)? Interestingness of posts? Comment volume of posts?

What makes you think someone is a significant user? Do you consider yourself a very active user, and what affects that perception?

Comments

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, activity through involvement in others' posts. I hadn't thought much about that, although it seems clear now that you mention it that it would have a huge impact.

I think 1/day is more frequent than any but a small subset post. You, for reference, post once every 2.2 days, and I do not think of your posting as infrequent...

[peregrinning.livejournal.com]

I look at active users like rufinia and liamstliam, who post multiple times a day, as my comparison. You seem to be able to look these things up: what are their posts per day/days per post numbers?

I have some month-long gaps in my posting record. How long of a time-frame are your numbers based on? One year, or all the way back to the creation of the account?

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, the only convenient metric I know of is looking at the full profile page and dividing the age of the account by the number of posts. This doesn't give any sort of graph of usage over time, but does have the benefit of counting posts on all privacy levels.

liamstliam is at a post every 1.2 days, which is pretty heavily active, and rufinia is at 2.7 posts per day, which is the highest I've seen so far. Perhaps I have looked at an insufficient body of data to be able to make any good generalizations...

[gyzki.livejournal.com]

Another metric is looking at the archive calendar by month. Clumsy and time-consuming to do for any great number of people over any great period of time, but potentially useful for tracking trends of usage over time. For instance, you cite rufinia as the highest user you've tracked (and I would agree), but it might be useful to compare/contrast rufinia unemployed, with rufinia at old job and grad school, with rufinia at new job.

Me, I think of myself as posting about 2 out of every three days, and the age/posts metric bears that out, roughly. But a look at my calendar shows nearly one per day the past few months, and back in my first year (2004) sometimes less than one per week. (Of course, my current "nearly one per day" includes a lot of "[cute observation] Just sayin'," which isn't much of a post.)