Why I am Disabling the User Stats

In considering whether I should make user stats visible on our forum I extracted some of the data about the Discourse team from this forum.

From this data, i considered two questions: Who is the most complementary of the team? and; Who is the most likable? The analysis is below.

A few conclusions can be drawn.
Despite his reputation @codinghorror is clearly the most congenial of the team, giving a Like to 13% of his all time reads However @zogstrip seems to be in a particularly good mood recently and is closing in terms of propensity to like. If you get a like from @eviltrout treasure it; they are few and far between.

In terms of likability, @techAPJ leads the way getting more than 2 likes for every topic/post entry. @neil has suddenly become popular - new aftershave? @eviltrout attracts a high number of likes, perhaps from users trying to encourage him to reciprocate.

Having seen how dangerous this information can be in the wrong hands, I won’t be publishing it on our site. :wink:

4 Likes

I think you may be misconstruing just what a Like signifies.

True, it may be used as a measure of popularity by some, but I don’t think that is the only reason it is used. eg.

  • I acknowledge having seen your post and agree but have little more to say
  • Hah! that made me smile :smile:
  • I don’t fully agree with you, but I think you made some excellent points
  • I appreciate your sharing that information

etc. etc.

6 Likes
  1. This information is available to anyone who scrapes the site
  2. I am not following what is so dangerous about this information.
5 Likes

Someone’s ego could get so big their head would explode?

4 Likes

Wait a second, I only got 1.5 likes per post this month?

To be fair, my post count is pretty high. One way to game likes-per-post is to only post when you have something significant to add.

Regis has always been a like machine. In his defense, his heart is full of love.

13 Likes

This is a very strong indicator you are not posting enough animated gifs on meta. Our correctional officer will be contacting you shortly.

20 Likes

True that! Most of the likes I get is from @zogstrip or @codinghorror! :heart:

2 Likes

That’s because I :heart: you all :wink:

5 Likes

More seriously, this reminds me of things we have yet to do:

  • the default user page tab should be your “greatest hits”, things people liked the most that you posted in the last (n) days, or have the interval auto select like /top does

  • you should be able to tell, somewhere, the people that you like the most, and that like you the most.

  • we probably should show a last (n) days like count on people’s user cards somewhere, since it is the primary metric we care about

15 Likes

I like the idea of greatest hits, but don’t see too much value “people you like most”, its not as if much good can result of it.

2 Likes

You say that as if I love all my children equally. Pshaw.

4 Likes

User Stats are my preferred 1.3 feature! Because it says a lot about people… And how the engage each others! Please improve it in this way :wink:
It push people to make the best, always :wink:

Congratulations, you got one!

I’d like to echo the sentiment that this data is not dangerous at all to me. I may give fewer likes than some, but they still enhance my use of the site quite a bit: I often find on other forums I frequent that I want to hit like rather than post a reply.

In fact, I love the fact that my likes are more valuable than those from @zogstrip. :wink:

6 Likes

If by the most congenial, you mean, automatically likes any and all bug reports because of raisins… yes.

The stats on this meta forum don’t really signify the same thing as they would on a regular forum because this one is being dogfooded as a bugtracker and using likes to measure importance (or something).

So here likes are a combined measure of likability as well as how useful/contributing to Discourse’s state of being that their posts are.
<so maybe it kind of says something that the certain someone has spammed the crap out of it yet has such a low likes to posts ratio…?>

And like @sam, i’m not sure what exactly is dangerous about knowing how often a person hits a heart-shaped button on a forum. You’re afraid people would know what members on your forum are active and not jerks, all without having to read many threads?

5 Likes

This is faulty logic.

I don’t “like” people, I like content.

4 Likes

I “like” that content! :smiley:

On my forum, there are some people whose content I won’t “like” no matter how good it may be, especially the guy who has bragged to me about how many “likes” he gets, and that therefore the disparity between his public expectations of others and his own public behavior is non-existent.

2 Likes

This was indeed completed in, I think, Discourse 1.5 or 1.6? Visit your own user page to see it.

6 Likes