META: Select Summary MGoPoint Statistics - June 2012

Submitted by LSAClassOf2000 on

MGoPoints – June 2012 Summary Statistics

First and foremost, I will apologize for this being somewhat untimely, but for the better half of the first portion of July, I was sort of sucked into the vortex of long hours that passes for storm duty at Detroit Edison. In any event, I took it upon myself to gather some summary data regarding MGoPoints for the top 300 users by point totals on MGoBlog.

Considering that there are over 10,000 people with positive point totals from 1 to Brian and there is little point in tracking people who currently reside in the MGoBlog Compound For Wayward Bloggers just outside of La Paz, I figured that the 300 most endowed (with points – didn’t have time or the stomach for the other metric) might be interesting.

In the month of June, among the “Top 300” MGoBloggers by point totals, 219 of them actually contributed at least one post and those users generated 7,332 points in June. Many of the summary statistics involve the non-zero totals just to provide some insight into the activity of the more active posters.  Data was collected around 5:30 PM each Friday.

WEEKLY CHANGE  FOR ALL 300 MGOBLOGGERS:

  Week 1 Week 2 Week 3  Week 4
MAXIMUM 51175 51375 51575 51675
MINIMUM 2094 2099 2099 2099
AVERAGE 5370 5379 5386 5394
MEDIAN 3439 3440 3444 3451
MODE 3525 3527 2608 2374
STD DEV 5487 5500 5509 5520
VARIANCE 30103474 30251572 30351970 3047462

The chart above shows summary statistics for the week-to-week totals for all 300 in the studied group.

As you might expect, there is rather a lot of separation between many people in this group. The maximum (which is, of course, Brian’s point total) is over 49,000 points removed from the minimum of this group. Over the course of four weeks, the average moved a mere 24 points and the median only moved 12 points, but what is most interesting here is the steep drop in the mode, falling almost 1,200 points from the beginning of June. Going through the data, there is an inordinate amount of ranking changes and several users are separated by a small number of points, resulting in several instances of duplicate totals.

FIFTEEN MOST PROLIFIC USERS:

The chart below highlights the fifteen people who graced MGoBlog most often in the month of June among the top 300 users by points.

User Additional Points
Brian 500
M-Wolverine 456
hart20 309
WolvinLA2 274
Ace 261
Magnus 224
jamiemac 221
Seth 206
JeepinBen 166
LSAClassOf2000 155
bacon1431 142
Needs 133
CRex 116
jmblue 109
gordie bell 109

These totals do not differentiate between individual posts, diaries and front page content, but as you will note from the presence of Brian, Ace and Seth on this list, that is an excellent way to drive one’s total. Their content is largely confined to the front page and the odd diary post (jamiemac had an active June as well with content that was bumped), so while they are not necessarily the most prolific contributors by volume, they do garner the most points for their work.  It should be noted that these fifteen users account for 46% of all the points generated in the month of June by this group.

PERFORMANCE METRICS:

To gauge the performance of the top MGoUsers, I divided the group into six groups of 50 users each, sorted first by their point total as of June 29th, and then the total change in points. For this, I called each group “First 50”, “Second 50”, etc…

  First 50 Second 50 Third 50 Fourth 50 Fifth 50 Sixth 50
TOTAL: 3355 1204 650 691 1160 282
% OF JUNE TOTAL 46% 16% 9% 9% 16% 4%
AVERAGE 80 35 16 19 33 9
MEDIAN 22 7 6 3 2 2
STD DEV. 108 43 17 23 51 8

Not surprisingly, the first two groups (or top 100 users by points) account for 62% of the total production in the month of June. However, as you can see, it isn’t as if the other groups are exactly quiet, for the next three groups (or 150 users) make up another 34% of the production. You have to get to what is essentially page 9 and 10 of the “Users By MGoPoints” page  before you find less vocal people on this site, but this can also be attributed to the fact that it is the off-season and some of them likely will be heard once late August or so comes around.

There is a noted lack of dispersion among some of the groups here, so a fair number of people actually post at relatively the same rate. In the first group, because of the very wide range in point totals (51,675 to 7,932, to be precise), and due to the fact that this encompasses most of the staff contributors as well as the more vocal members, the dispersion in point totals is much greater. Something that is also interesting here is the fifth group of 50, which would be the users in positions 201 to 250 – this is where much of the position shifting occurred, with some users jump as many as seven positions in the overall rankings. There were a few people in this group who posted quite a bit, and indeed, they are on the list of most prolific users for the month.

I plan to do this for July as well, if there is interest, and perhaps each month - it is an evolving concept. I plan to insert some additional charts when I get home tonight (because the security settings will not let me do this easily at work), but I wanted the group to see the raw data as well.

Comments

Space Coyote

July 18th, 2012 at 12:22 PM ^

You could pretty much cut and paste a lot of the text, hopefully the tables are pretty spreadsheet friendly, and maybe add a year to date section.  It would be interesting to keep up with.

Plus I'm sure you would enjoy watching your endowment rise (that endowment too?) as you got +10 for each diary. Something to consider...

LSAClassOf2000

July 18th, 2012 at 1:09 PM ^

I actually thought about that, so I created another workbook which will be the grand monthly data for each month. If this gains traction, what I might do will be to have "Quarterly Statements" for every 12 weeks of data and turn this into a more thorough dive into the blog (with an appropriate amount of charts, and if I can get the software to actually work on this machine at work, some more detailed data on the distribution itself).

Seth

July 18th, 2012 at 12:56 PM ^

This doesn't take into account things like "M-Wolverine pointing out that he has more points than people and a power-mad Seth being all like 'O RLY' owl and bumping himself to 2nd place.

There's little accuracy in the point system anymore. Pos-bangs for great work used to make it helpful for identifying good readers. Now it's a tracker of how many times people post.

Best to remove the staff and modders from the field since we can make things go haywire.

LSAClassOf2000

July 18th, 2012 at 1:01 PM ^

...and on a semi-related note, I actually did take into account any discipline issued by the mods actually. Indeed, I was notified of it in a few instances. What I did is use what a blogger's total would have been had they not been sent on a sales call to Bolivian for purposes of tracking "productivity" in this case.

M-Wolverine

July 18th, 2012 at 1:10 PM ^

The thing I noticed is how your point total has skyrocketed.....Didn't you used to be in the high teens (k)?

Edit:  In after the edit.  Though now I think you've answered the questions.

Edit2: If it makes you feel any better, I think it was Geax Blue, but maybe it was you, but someone gave Brian a 10,000 point bust at one point, because he was like 3rd or 4th on his own site. And since the points don't go away anymore, there was never a 10k plunge.  So you're not alone. There's precedent. 

In reply to by M-Wolverine

Seth

July 18th, 2012 at 1:55 PM ^

Brian does his own bumping. I dont remember the context of mine anymore, just that someone was speaking very seriously about the top points holders so I was moved to show how little they matter.

The Diarist of the Week bumps come in 200-point bursts (when I don't forget to give 'em). That might be a neat thing to see.

MGoShoe

July 18th, 2012 at 3:36 PM ^

...about Geaux Blue once giving Brian a hefty points bump. I'm pretty sure it was when Formerly Anonymous was the high points man, and Geaux Blue thought that was unseemly.

The top points list in and of itself has little meaning. When I was posting voluminously, I had about 15K more points than I do now and for a time had more points than anyone save Brian. I lost them in the period after the institution of the new points system (no +/- bonuses) and before Brian ended points expiry. A third of those came from a 5K point bump Brian once gave me when I was a fairly new poster. The other portion came from the physical impossibility of creating enough posts to keep up with my points expiry. Before Brian instituted the new points system, there was a kerfuffle on the board and polls/diaries and MGoBoard threads were posted decrying the old system as unduly rewarding high volume posters who then developed outsized reputations and were inappropriately posbanged. My point total in early 2011 may very well have been based on an outsized reputation, but it's certainly the case that it was primarily the result of the net pos/negbangs I received, not the number of threads and posts created even given my then prodigous number of diaries, threads and comments. 

I fully support Brian's move to the new system because in the past, there were way too many douchey things going on like users creating multiple accounts to attack MGoUsers they had an e-beef with and I know Brian tired of people complaining to him about such things. This system pretty much solved this issue. That said, in the new system, if you want your e-peen to increase, the only way to do that is to post, post, post. A dedicated commenter could easily post more than 10 posts in threads in the time it takes to create a quality diary. Your practice of rewarding Diarists of the week with a 200 pt bump is a great approach to reward quality contributions to the site. OTOH, it may make sense to reenable pos/negbang points for the authors of diaries and board threads. The positive and negative reinforcement that would provide may encourage/discourage certain desirable/undesirable posting behaviors.

Smash Lampjaw

July 18th, 2012 at 1:21 PM ^

Is the formula a closely guarded secret? Is it harder to maintain karma level with many thousands of points? Even though rule #1 is don't talk about the points, they are a much more common topic than karma.

LSAClassOf2000

July 18th, 2012 at 7:12 PM ^

It would be great if karma were part of the userpoints table, as this would have provided an interesting dimension to the statistics. Actually, I believe the module they use for the site is Simple Karma from Drupal, but I could be mistaken (there are a few karma modules available for Drupal-powered sites). When the current system was first instituted, I believe there were several long threads devoted to the notion of karma as it pertained to MGoBlog. 

TESOE

July 18th, 2012 at 1:27 PM ^

The rich get richer and the poor get nothing...mostly due to insider trading.  God bless America. 


First 50

Second 50

Third 50

Fourth 50

Fifth 50

Sixth 50

3355

1204

650

691

1160

282

This is a cool idea and well done.   I wouldn't mind seeing a list of Bolivian exiles or Karma-ness (what is the dharma of Karma anyway?)

 

oriental andrew

July 18th, 2012 at 3:43 PM ^

I never understood (or maybe just never cared to understand) the point of, er, points.  Beyond, of course, things like posting limits or negative point totals for trolls/Bolivians.  Why does it matter that I have x number of points, which is 500 more than Joe, but 1000 less than Bob?  Do people derive some sort of pride from this, or is it supposed to lend an air of credibility to one's posts? 

justingoblue

July 18th, 2012 at 8:35 PM ^

and I don't know how many posters MGoBlog had in June 2008, but I know when I joined I tried to take my cue from the guys with a ton of points. That was partly because they were constantly being given more points in the old posbang system, but it also meant they spent a good deal of time here and probably knew what the culture here was like. Since I got to know my way around, I could not care less. There are some guys with a ton of points who I don't like as posters, and plenty of low point users I love as posters.

Anyway, it was useful to me when I joined, just to get the lay of the land and whatnot. It's also probably useful when outsiders come and see our discussions and see "random stupid comment" next to -100, joined two days ago user with a NSFW avatar, and an intelligent reply from someone like you with a lot of points and a join date from 2008.

Zone Left

July 20th, 2012 at 7:39 PM ^

Movement among the top posters has been severely restricted since upvoting ceased to exist. It's pretty challenging to post 5000 times and catch MGoShoe, for example. Of course, I could ask Seth to give me a million-billion points for no good reason.

LSAClassOf2000

July 20th, 2012 at 8:31 PM ^

You should ask for the proverbial raise, of course, but then I suppose much depends on the dreaded performance evaluation, right? 

Once I actually collect enough data, I may do a section on projected totals for a small group of users, but it might be some time before what I am doing can produce decent predictions with acceptable error.