Read time metrics

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

One thing I still feel like is missing from the dashbaord is any surfacing of information about how much people are reading since Reading is Fundamental:

@codinghorror

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.

This is something I pay closer attention to than any other metric:

@mcwumbly

How much people are reading seems like one of the most fundamental things we should be measuring.

I think plotting it (and other metrics) as distributions across the user base has proven to be the most informative way for me to understand how people are engaging with the site:

@mcwumbly

We’ve started to play around with better ways to measure this and so far, something like this is looking promising:

Number of Users who have read at least N Posts over 28 day periods

Writing metrics

We are also exploring measuring writing activity similarly:

Number of Users who have created at least N Posts over 28 day periods

I can imagine doing something more similar to this though, which would combine the percentile distributions on a time-series graph more like what you already have on the dashboard. (Just imagine the percentile “response time” buckets are instead bins of user engagement on the reading or posting axis).