TIL TIL stats - TIL about the TIL success on Steemit
... and TIL that I could write four times TIL in a title :)
Exactly one week ago, a new initiative was started on Steemit, about having short posts triggering discussions and fun. In the case you missed the announcement, please click here.
In the following, I focus on the TIL case and present a few statistics related to its first week of being around.
[image credits: pixabay]
TIL ON STEEMIT - HOW TO DEFINE ITS SUCCESS?
After a week, I was wondering how well was the above-mentioned initiative received by the Steemit community. There are dozens of ways to assess that, and I personally used this question as a motivation to start implementing pythonic tools to access the Steemit database and make the information I was looking for human readable.
Before going anywhere, all the results I will show here rely on the steemtools python package made by @furion and the steemdb project created by @jesta. And the last but not the least, I am personally thanking @cristi for his help on finding appropriate tools!
After thinking a bit, I think that the TIL success can be measured with three factors:
- the number of votes that shows how much users are attracted by a post;
- the number of comments that show how a post triggers discussions (which is the researched goal in the TIL case);
- the post rewards, that I do not need to comment ;)
And I will represent my findings as a function of these three factors.
STATISTICS
In order to be able to draw any conclusive statement, it is mandatory to have a point of comparison. I therefore choose to compare TIL statistics to those originating from the science category (my preferred Steemit category, with a small number of daily posts) and the photography category (one of the most popular category on Steemit).
The data includes articles posted from Nov 15th at 17:12 UTC to Nov 22nd at 17:11 UTC (i.e. a full week). This consists of:
- 245 science posts
- 1262 photography posts
- 356 TIL posts
This already shows that TIL posts are trending and receive attention from many. Good, one of the goals seems thus completed.
I will now quickly describe the TIL success in terms of the success factors defined above. As a result of the number of posts above-mentioned, care must be taken as any result will have to be attached to a rather large statistical uncertainty. We probably have enough material to get the trend, but not enough to go beyond this. My analysis is for this reason very brief.
The data of all written TIL posts can be summarized in the figure below:
Most of the posts are located in the lower-right corner of the figure: those all correspond to:
- low-rewarded posts with a payout that is less than 5-10 SBD;
- posts with very few comments since a blue point means less than 10 comments;
- a number of votes ranging from 0 to 150.
We also have a few green and turquoise points that are representative of posts that triggered a more intense comment activity.
One important threshold is, in my opinion, the number of votes equal to 175. Above this number, most posts are connected to a larger number of comments and many got rewarded by at least 10 SBD. Would this 175 number be representative of the number of bots (or users with a bot behavior)? Possibly I would say.
From the figure, it is also clear that TIL posts in general attract many votes. However, many TIL posts are not that commented out. The number of comments seems to be only slightly correlated to the number of votes. If the latter is above 175, it is likely that the post has attracted more than 10 comments.
Finally, concerning payouts, many posts are below the 5 SBD threshold. It is difficult to assess anything concerning the posts that have been rewarded more than 5 SBD as we are missing statistics. The only thing we can say is that almost all posts that got more than 20 SBD as a reward have attracted a lot of comments.
I am afraid to draw any strong conclusion here. We probably need more statistics. But we can already get a clue about the trend. One should not conclude more, in my opinion.
COMPARISON WITH PHOTOGRAPHY AND SCIENCE
We observe (top figure) that science posts are generally not triggering that many discussions and that the payouts are half of the time below the 20 SBD line. It is however dangerous to conclude anything as we are dealing with small numbers. The distribution in the number of votes is however very similar to the TIL case.
Concerning the photography case (lower figure, with a different scale on the y-axis), we observe once again a similar distribution for the number of votes. The payouts are however this time all concentrated mostly below the 10 SBD line, with few exceptions (that are very largely rewarded). One important point here is that a good fraction of photography posts are posts that attract comments but it is rare to see more than 50 comments. Comments and number of votes seem to be uncorrelated.
CONCLUSIONS
The TIL initiative can be seen as a success since;:
- A large fraction of TIL posts are posts that get many comments, at least when compared with two other post categories.
- Rewards can be larger than in other categories, even when compared to the most popular categories. We all know why (thanks!)!
- The distributions in the number of votes seems very similar in all considered cases, which is the most puzzling result in my opinion.
Disclaimer: Will I post such a stat post everyday? No! Every week? No! I would however be more than happy to provide statistics of any kind on request (if I can code it of course) through the Steemit chat.
As to the science posts and discussion. I read them with great interest and always try to up vote them when I happen to see one. However, you and a few others really know your stuff. You also in particular seem well versed in critical thinking so you don't seem to make appeal to authority, and generalization type mistakes. Thus, it can be very difficult to give you a good comment other than. "That is very cool, thank you for writing this" I don't want you to stop. I truly enjoy your posts and the posts of others. I up vote them, though I may not always comment. When I have something I think might be worthy of saying I promise you I will.
Agreed a lot of the science posts are very well done. They strike the right balance between being interesting but not being sensationalist (or just as bad completely boring and dry like a journal). Sometimes I feel a bit embarrassed just putting "fantastic job" for the Nth time lol! I suspect that is a reason a lot of people don't actually comment. There is also the issue that we seem to have a bit of a lull in activity - possibly a combination of the price and time of year.
This is however something very hard to assess. It is probably hidden in the number of votes, but it is not clear to me how to distinguish it from the bots.
Thanks for this very kind message! That's probably of the nicest I have ever read!
I was not actually focusing on my own posts, but most on generalities regarding given categories and to get actually data (there should be 2 or 3 of my posts in these hundreds of posts). I know my posts are generally not the ones attracting the longest discussions (and it is fine, don't worry) as my goal is more to share information and make it accessible to the general audience (via Steemit).
Anyhow thanks for your comment (and for your interesting posts which I appreciate the reading) :)
I am giving you a second reply. I used to write far more lengthy replies to quite a number of posts. You could get up voted and rewarded quite well for taking the time to engage in a good discussion. That has declined substantially so if financial motivation is any type of factor for a person (subjective to each person) then they may not see devoting that amount of time as beneficial as it once was.
The other factor of course is the nesting limit on replies. I've been in many discussions where we hit that limit and have to either start replying in other places which puts it kind of out of context, or make a blog post that is a reply to a comment. That can be a bit limiting to deep back and forth debate unless you manage to say everything you want to say within a limited number of exchanges.
Thanks for your second answer which I fully agree with!
The nesting is indeed not visually great, in particular when you reach the limit and you end up with a very small column of text. Maybe will this improve in the future (I am not sure that this has ever been reported).
Concerning the discussions, I noticed too that the situation changed drastically in about a month or two. It is however important to distinguish comments and discussions. Something I must admit I haven't made with my stats.
I reported about the reply limit issue the first month I used Steemit (July) as you have no doubt noticed I can be pretty verbose. I hit that limit pretty quickly a number of times. I was even engaged in some big debates that myself and others spread across blog posts which we used to respond to each other rather than trying to do it using comment and replies.
Hopefully this will be fixed... one day.
Probably reducing the indent could be something simple to implement, and that will already help to keep the text width large enough (improving the readability) and possibly allowing for one or two extra layers of nesting.
From what I read it is more related to how rewards are calculated. They have a fixed limit so it does not have to recurse too far to determine how to distribute rewards. At least that is what I was told. I was of the opinion that they could allow further posts and only reward to a certain depth if they wanted. At least then we could still have unrestricted conversations. That tabs could definitely become a problem as well.
Thank you for doing this! It is interesting to see! I like the idea of the shorter posts and I have been posting shorter form posts just about every day since their introduction. I think it should help with user retention... not everyone is a great writer but just about everyone can put together a paragraph or two on something they find interesting. Just my thoughts at least :)
I think many users agree, according to my findings at least. An interesting number that I could add could be the number of posts / comments per author.
I am enjoying writing TIL posts as well :D
Me too. Although I prefer long texts :)
Interesting)
@lemouth, why not a weekly perspective to see how things progress? or at least every once in a while?! :)
Maybe every once in a while :)
Or at least, I can update you on the chat. Since the scripts are ready, it is only a matter of letting them run overnight every ten days.
yep i was interested and got here. i dont know if my upvote counts but i did uppped and resteemed, so i can read it once i am home. the whole concept was a joy to see grow and it is causing inspiration for me. i did a recent post and still put it under til, do take a look. i will be off from work tomorrow, so i will be able to do a lengthier post under other tags. it is really helpful to be able to do short post. before now, i would even try it for fear it may be frowned at as not being original. but you spotting amazing things on its own, is original. many may see amazing things and cant spot it. i would definitely enjoy reading this post as the whole concept that started a week a go was a joy to watch as i got to be part of it. funny thing is i didnt know of it till @sykochica told me. she has been one amazing woman!
Writing short posts is in my opinion a good way to motivate people who do not have too much the time to write length posts to write, as well as it could potentially attract new users as the format is very popular on other platforms (like Reddit, although I am not on it myself and I only report what I heard).
Personally, it was also a way to attract new followers who had probably never heard about me and what I write (restricting myself to writing about science in the science category). I guess this feature is also true for others.
In order to continue the personal story, each upvote counts, but comments are more important to me :)
The posts on the sciences have existed for nearly 6 months while TIL for less than 2 weeks. So, can we compare them? TIL is new and there is a new interest as introceyourself in the beginning.
Of course, this must be accounted for, depending however of what you want to do. In my case, I wanted to gauge the immediate success of the TIL initiative and compare it to activity of two long-standing categories that are science (low new post rate) and photography (important new poste rate). For more, we mut probably collect statistics over a month or two.
Happy birthday by the way!
Due to the number of bots, auto-voting, and trails, I think that "number of votes" is a very poor metric to use for the "success" of a post. I would think that quality commenting would be the best to measure that. Even comments as a raw number is skewed due to the number of people simply looking to add to their post totals and fishing for upvotes from them.
If the comment is a genuine reply to the content that you posted, I'd go with that as the best measure for "success."
I agree. I was actually making a remark with this respect in my post.
Using comments may be the key, but they should not be used as such to. Some comments are there only to thank the author for sharing (or similar) while others are really triggering discussions. For the moment, I have no automatic way to assess what is what, beyond using the length of the comment (but is this reliable?).
What also reinforce what you said is that the distribution in the number of votes seems similar whatever is the category. I have not tried, but I guess we can assume that the distribution may be similar in mot categories (above a certain popularity threshold).
Is this initiative something that is meant to continue for long period? Or is it bound to stop! Is one allowed to write more than 1 til post in day? Or will there start to be criticism along the way?
I am not in charge at all of the TIL stuff. Therefore, I cannot answer. But I guess it may last for some time :)
hi lemouth, i will really like to read this post that i just wrote as it is really important to me, does excite me a bit too. please lemme some feedback or questions, i will explain: https://steemit.com/curie/@surpassinggoogle/finally-i-have-found-out-who-i-am-on-steemit-and-how-to-fully-add-to-the-beauty-of-the-steemit-community
Hi,
I am currently traveling with a limited internet connection for the next 10 days. I will try but I cannot promise. Sorry.
yes, it is okay. be safe!