Thanks for writing this Nick—the comments/post graph is really useful to me and definitely dismaying to see. I wonder what the trends look like for other cause areas (I might try and figure out how to claude code an answer to that myself).
I’d personally be sad to see an end to GHD conversation on the Forum, and I’m keen to hear more ideas for re-igniting it. For example—events we could run (debate weeks, theme weeks), writers we should cross-post to the Forum (in the hope of enticing them on to comment) etc...
FWIW there will be a week-long GHD related event in April which should promote some discussion. More details coming soon when it’s confirmed.
I wonder what the trends look like for other cause areas.
I thought about this too. It would be interesting to know the details, but I would be surprised if the number of comments per post decreased more in the overall population of posts than in GHD posts. According to Nick’s 1st graph, there were around 9 comments per GHD post in the 1st 3 months of 2021, and around 2 in the last few months, 22.2 % as many (= 2⁄9), which means there was a reduction of 77.8 % (= 1 − 0.222). In contrast, as illustrated below, the number of engagement hours per day, and posts per month with at least 2 of karma are slightly higher today, which means the number of engagement hours per post has not changed much since early 2021. I guess the number of comments per post is not very far from proportional to the number of engagement hours per post. So I suspect the number of comments per post has not changed a lot in the overall population of posts.
Thanks for writing this Nick—the comments/post graph is really useful to me and definitely dismaying to see. I wonder what the trends look like for other cause areas (I might try and figure out how to claude code an answer to that myself).
I’d personally be sad to see an end to GHD conversation on the Forum, and I’m keen to hear more ideas for re-igniting it. For example—events we could run (debate weeks, theme weeks), writers we should cross-post to the Forum (in the hope of enticing them on to comment) etc...
FWIW there will be a week-long GHD related event in April which should promote some discussion. More details coming soon when it’s confirmed.
Hi Toby.
I thought about this too. It would be interesting to know the details, but I would be surprised if the number of comments per post decreased more in the overall population of posts than in GHD posts. According to Nick’s 1st graph, there were around 9 comments per GHD post in the 1st 3 months of 2021, and around 2 in the last few months, 22.2 % as many (= 2⁄9), which means there was a reduction of 77.8 % (= 1 − 0.222). In contrast, as illustrated below, the number of engagement hours per day, and posts per month with at least 2 of karma are slightly higher today, which means the number of engagement hours per post has not changed much since early 2021. I guess the number of comments per post is not very far from proportional to the number of engagement hours per post. So I suspect the number of comments per post has not changed a lot in the overall population of posts.