The discussion revolves around including reading time in the site stats. probus suggests adding a metric for the time spent reading forum posts to the admin dashboard, citing Medium’s success with this approach. This metric could provide insights into content engagement when viewed alongside views or post counts. However, sam points out that reading time is not tracked for anonymous users, who comprise the majority of site traffic.
codinghorror agrees with the idea, emphasizing the importance of read time and read flags in user metrics. Despite the challenge of tracking anonymous users, codinghorror proposes showing read time, post read flags, and topic enter flags in aggregate and per user. The reason for not tracking anonymous read time is due to technical challenges, increased load, and data storage requirements.
I believe we should add another metric into the admin dashboard. What I’m specifically thinking is:
The time spent reading forum posts
I know Discourse already tracks reading time so it should be possible to show an aggregate number in the admin panel. It’s easy to understand and communicate. Medium makes a pretty convincing case about why they decided to make this their primary metric.
This would also be great to see per topic. When viewed along view or post count it gives you insights about how engaging the content is. See this blog post from Upworthy.
I do agree with this; I’ve said for a long time that Reading is Fundamental and that’s why read time (and read flags) are weighted so heavily in user metrics.
We don’t know anon reading time, as Sam mentioned, but we could start showing read time, post read flags, topic enter flags both in aggregate and per user.
You generally don’t track anything for anon users because it is very technically challenging (by IP? Not specific enough, need browser fingerprints), it massively increases load, and massively increases your data storage requirements.