Year and a half in review

Came across some stats I made in Google drive and thought I'd do a small amount to see where we have been.

First see previous thread: Years of Moderation

Two here's the one graph I felt like updating because it was too depressing:



Google Sheets sucks at graphs. The first bar is 2009. The last is the first half of 2016

 

Interesting decline. I wonder if there's a metric for the entire site, would be fascinating to see.

 

If I had access to the database I could run a bunch of direct SQL queries and get some better numbers. I just did this manually and it might be slightly wrong since it's handed counted and stuff.

 

Have you made any note of changing sub-forums of off-topic and how their continued change may have impacted the decline of general discussion? What was the quality of threads like back then as opposed to now?

 

There are a lot of variables to look at the increase in quality, but I believe it's almost a given that it has grown. Sythe has developed new methods of keeping banned members restricted, and keeping accounts secure using better account security like 2FA. Keeping these type of people out of the community increases the quality of the post, and I believe that is an extremely noticeable different even without statistics.

To check the statistics, they could contain too many variables to break it down in a simple format. Fewer bans, fewer infractions, and lower thread counts don't necessarily mean less activity. They could indicate that the forum has grown more secure and improved the overall system of how things are done. It depends on what you would consider activity. If you're defining it as the amount of the post made, then it would be lower.

I believe it should be looked at with the eye of quality>quantity and place a qualitative score value to gauge whether or not the forum has grown or declined.

Plus the forum's structure changes could impact the statistics of the off-topic section, as you have already stated. Therefore, I don't believe these statistics are proof of any concept unless someone were to study the data and create a logical qualitative approach to calculating growth.

 

We would have to know when the sub forums changed and what changed and I'm not sure we have that information. I literally just counted pages manually for this graph. If I could get on the database I could measure thread quality by number of posts in a thread, number of infractions in the thread, how long until the thread got locked, how long the thread was active (create date until last post), average amount of time between posts, etc but I'm not doing any of that by hand.

 

I think its no question the site is a lot smaller in terms of community, but I have no idea what the market is like. Maybe that's grown

 

I think the market has probably stayed the same or increased slightly in recent years. It seems to be the only section of Sythe that never takes a big activity hit.

 

I mod could do an approximation by totalling up pages of scam reports, which I assume would be a pretty good representation of market activity?

Actually I'm a dumbass and the scammer archive is public.

 

The market does indeed seem to be doing better. There may be seasonality in the market so this first half of the year dip might just be nothing.

 

I normalized them and threw them on the same graph:



I'm not sure what happened in 2011. If we get rid of it the market is slowly improving but the community is dropping like a rock.

Edit: The media section is doing better than General Discussion:



I don't think subsections stealing activity accounts for the massive drop (in this graph the difference is magnified because they are normalized. Media is actually very small compared to general discussion) but it might be doing slightly better than the first graph tells.

 

Anyone can tell without a doubt that General Discussion activity is dropping. First page would always have threads from within the past day or two, at worst a few days (3-4). Nowadays, you've got things on the first page from at least a week ago. And don't get me started on the threads that are even "active". They're poor quality or just bumped with random shit because they're already a few pages long so shitposters don't worry about getting infracted or seen.

The community decline is sad to see, but honestly I think with the recent work the Community Development Team has done, it is the best team in past years. We've got a few things set for summer too, so hopefully that will bring some activity too. Graphs can't measure dopeness of a community

 

I believe this decline in community unity may have had a large part in RS seeing as this is an RS orientated forum. As you can see the years of rise/decline match up with major RS events. (Ex: In 2011 free trade/wildy came back, in 2012 the release of EoC was implemented) As for today, I think people are starting to realize that there are far more advanced games than RS in 2016 and are just making the switch seeing as this forum is run oriented on a game that is dying. Also, Sythe has recently become a haven for people who scam/vade and repeat and users who get scammed by these scammers will usually lose interest in the site and quit. There are also oldfag users who used to actively participated in this forum in lets say 2011. If they were 16-18 at the time of actively participating in this forum, they're now 21-23 and therefore much busier with life than they were before. Just a few of my ideas but i'm sure there's a lot more that factors into this.

 

Well what I really want to know is why there are over 5 million posts in RS Mart yet CS:GO which is EXTREMELY popular only has like 60k? What we do to improve that niche of the community? or LoL or WoW etc. I think if we can address those markets/communities then the site as a whole would greatly improve traffic wise. Just my 2 cents though

 

A good thing to do is maybe get in on this lotto thing with skins and get one set up that could work for the site done your way. The only reason some of these youtubers got into trouble was because they lied about being owners of the company. Also, valve really didnt like them using their login API on their sites.

Secondly, going back to my post on having live streams embedded, a LOT of people go and watch people play CS:GO, hell even I do. There is a HUGE community here, untapped by Sythe that you could capitalize on.

I think if you were to do more events pertinent to that specific game, whether its CSGO, LoL, WOW etc then you could get more activity there. To be honest, I am quite confused as to WHY these sections are not very active, but my guess is because of how its shown by search engines. keywords, page ranking etc.

Ill be thinking of other things too. But what I do know is Skins are where its at so that should be a starting point

 

Also, Sythe dont forget LoL, which is also HUGELY popular, probably moreso than CSGO.

Maybe if we could do ELO boosting giveaways or get some of our members to form game parties then itd go up. Also itd be cool if we could host tournaments etc. There is so much potential

 

@Sephiroth878


[Accepting Applications!] Community Development Team