For a few months now I've been collecting specific data on the metrics of all SE sites throughout the network, and there's a disturbing fact that has arisen.
This data isn't yet public on my end, but it's almost there. In light of that I wanted to bring a certain concern to the communities attention.
When I was going through and reviewing some of our data, I noticed that our site (Code Review) is ranked very low on the voting rank. When we compare ourselves to only graduated sites, we rank in 56th on the Votes Per User scale. Meaning, there are 55 graduated sites that have a higher Votes Per User rate than us, considering there are only 71 graduated sites in the system, that puts us in the 21st percentile. We only have a higher Votes Per User rank than 21% of graduated SE sites.
What is the raw value? Well it's 4.54, that means that for all of our users, we have an average number of 4.54 votes per user. In the lifetime of CR, we have 4.54 votes per user.
The highest value of all graduated sites is Mi Yodeya, at 35.48 votes per user. This should not be a hard value for Code Review to achieve.
If we consider all non-Meta sites we are in 104th place, out of 159. That's only the 35th percentile. We're still lower than 65% of all non-Meta SE sites.
What is the breakdown? Of the 103 sites ahead of us, 1 is a Closed Beta, 55 are Graduated, and 47 are Open Beta. Almost half the sites we rank below are beta sites. We rank below 29 Meta sites.
Site State | Total Above | Total Below | Highest VPU | Lowest VPU | Average VPU
------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+------------+------------
Open Beta | 47 | 39 | 27.79 | 1.35 | 5.67
Meta | 29 | 128 | 10.35 | 0.30 | 3.26
Normal | 55 | 15 | 35.48 | 0.82 | 8.51
Closed Beta | 1 | 1 | 11.62 | 1.49 | 6.55
If we instead look at Votes Per Entity (where an entity is a question or answer) we end up with an even more disappointing chart:
Site State | Total Above | Total Below | Highest VPE | Lowest VPE | Average VPE
------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+------------+------------
Open Beta | 38 | 48 | 7.96 | 1.36 | 4.33
Meta | 97 | 60 | 19.74 | 1.87 | 5.14
Normal | 28 | 42 | 16.11 | 1.22 | 4.59
Closed Beta | 1 | 1 | 6.94 | 0.72 | 3.83
Our Votes Per Entity is 4.42, which puts us at 165th of 316. If only counting graduated sites, we're 29th out of 71.
Finally, if we count Votes Per Day as the metric, and consider the number of days since launch as the number of days since the first public appearance (the date of the first Closed Beta, if none then the date of the first Open Beta, if none then the date of the Launch), we rank 30th out of 71 with graduated site, but we rank 32nd out of 316 when compared to all sites (including Meta's and betas).
Site State | Total Above | Total Below | Highest VPD | Lowest VPD | Average VPD
------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+------------+------------
Open Beta | 38 | 48 | 103.45 | 2.09 | 16.20
Meta | 97 | 60 | 108.77 | 0.19 | 3.52
Normal | 28 | 42 | 20318.85 | 4.92 | 431.37
Closed Beta | 1 | 1 | 46.00 | 12.07 | 29.03
Note: all this data is as of 2 August 2016 at approximately 00:05UTC+00:00.
The gathering of this data is as follows: each night I have a program which crawls the
/sites
API endpoint on SE, and gathers the list of all sites in the network. Then, after that is complete, it crawls the/info
API endpoint for each site and submits all data from that endpoint to my database. I then have a SQL query which I run on the database that reports all these metrics via multiple views and grouping.I'm currently putting together the finishing touches on a site where all this data will be hosted, allowing anyone who desires to go in and run queries against it.
If there are any other metrics as far as Votes Per Day, etc. that anyone thinks would be nice to have in this meta post, comment with the metric and I'll try to gather it around. (Or find me in The 2nd Monitor.)
All this is coming to the following:
- Is the lack of voting on Code Review a problem?
- If so, what, if anything, can we do to improve the voting participation by users?
/info
endpoint: api.stackexchange.com/docs/types/info and it appears to be the total number of registered users on the site. \$\endgroup\$TotalUsers
value. \$\endgroup\$