I was playing around with Lemmy statistics the other day, and I decided to take the number of comments per post. Essentially a measure of engagement – the higher the number the more engaging the post is. Or in other words how many people were pissed off enough to comment, or had something they felt like sharing. The average for every single Lemmy instance was 8.208262964 comments per post.

So I modeled that with a Poisson distribution, and I learnt that to a 5% significance level, if your post got less than 4 comments, that was statistically significant. Or in other words – there is a 95% probability that something else caused it not to get more comments. Now that could be because it is an AMAZING post – it covered all the points and no one has anything left to say. Or it’s because it’s a crappy post and you should be ashamed in yourself. Similarly a “good post”, one that gets lots of comments, would be any post that gets more than 13 comments. Anything in-between 4 and 13 is just an average post.

To give you an idea of a more sweeping internet trend, the adage 1% 9% 90%, where 1% do the posting, 9% do the commenting, and 90% are lurkers – assuming each person does an average of 1 thing a day, suggests that c/p should be about 9 for all sites regardless of size.

Now what is more interesting is that comments per post varies by instance, lemmy.world for example has an engagement of 9.5 c/p and lemmy.ml has 4.8 c/p, this means that a “good post” on .ml is a post that gets 9 comments, whilst a “good post” on .world has to get 15 comments. On hexbear.net, you need 20 comments, to be a “good post”. I got the numbers for instance level comments and posts from here

This is a little bit silly, since a “good post”, by this metric, is really just a post that baits lots and lots of engagement, specifically in the form of comments – so if you are reading this you should comment, otherwise you are an awful person. No matter how meaningless the comment.

Anyway I thought that was cool.