Rethinking Community Vitality: Why Posts + Comments per Month Trumps MAU
Rethinking Community Vitality: Why Posts + Comments per Month Trumps MAU
Hey fellow Lemmings,
I've been thinking about how we measure the liveliness of our communities, and I believe we're missing the mark with Monthly Active Users (MAU). Here's why I think Posts + Comments per Month (PCM) would be a superior metric:
Why PCM is Better Than MAU
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Quality over Quantity: MAU counts lurkers equally with active participants. PCM focuses on actual engagement.
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Spam Resistance: Creating multiple accounts to inflate MAU is easy. Generating meaningful posts and comments is harder.
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True Reflection of Activity: A community with 1000 MAU but only 10 posts/comments is less vibrant than one with 100 MAU and 500 posts/comments.
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Encourages Participation: Displaying PCM could motivate users to contribute more actively.
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Easier to Track: No need for complex user tracking. Just count posts and comments.
Implementation Ideas
- Show PCM in the community list alongside subscriber count
- Display PCM in each community's sidebar
- Use PCM for sorting "hot" communities
What do you think? Should we petition the Lemmy devs to consider implementing this? Let's discuss!
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Spam Resistance: Creating multiple accounts to inflate MAU is easy. Generating meaningful posts and comments is harder.
Isn't this actually just spam encouragement? A community with a bot that posts 50 low-value posts every day will have a much higher PCM as a result, and that behavior is more obnoxious to users and moderators who have to see it and deal with it, vs. someone creating a bunch of accounts, which is largely invisible to everyone else.