48 hours ago lobste.rs surpassed 20,000 users
181 points by aleyan
181 points by aleyan
The 20,000th user was siru by invitation from bbbhltz.
You may see all 20,000+ users and the invite tree by opening https://lobste.rs/users, but it takes about ~5 minutes to load, so I don't recommend it.
Hey, nice to meet you all. Didn't think I was going to be called out by name when opening this post.
"Stay a while and listen!"
I think the people who will get this reference are few and far between. But I'm proud to be one of them.
The Remastered Diablo II, and 3 and 4 are on Xbox Game Pass now, so I've just been replaying the old ones.
The active users chart is maybe more useful. The modal user signs up and never uses their account. This is typical for free social sites where almost everything is log-normal distributed.
MariaDB [lobsters]> with u_counts as (select users.id, (select count(*) from stories where user_id = users.id) as n_stories, (select count(*) from comments where user_id = users.id) as n_comments, (select count(*) from votes where user_id = users.id) as n_votes from users) select (n_stories + n_comments + n_votes) as n_activities, count(*) from u_counts group by 1 order by 1 asc
limit 20;
+--------------+----------+
| n_activities | count(*) |
+--------------+----------+
| 0 | 5849 |
| 1 | 1314 |
| 2 | 1132 |
| 3 | 607 |
| 4 | 649 |
| 5 | 438 |
| 6 | 392 |
| 7 | 304 |
| 8 | 317 |
| 9 | 254 |
| 10 | 248 |
| 11 | 175 |
| 12 | 203 |
| 13 | 172 |
| 14 | 159 |
| 15 | 144 |
| 16 | 141 |
| 17 | 152 |
| 18 | 112 |
| 19 | 106 |
+--------------+----------+
20 rows in set (2.283 sec)
It's also hard to count to 20,000, there's edge cases. Probably we shouldn't count inactive-user or the recent system users. And in 2014 or 2015 jcs manually deleted around a dozen spam accounts from the users table rather than ban them. (I noticed because I had to delete orphaned votes when I started enforcing foreign keys.) If those don't count, should other accounts banned for spam? Sockpuppets? Maybe only if banned under a few days old?
Happy to run queries people come up with, especially on office hours. I've been on a break the last couple weeks because of travel and guests but plan to resume this week. My schedule is picking up some commitments so I'll probably resume with a a Tuesday afternoon/Thursday morning schedule. It's likely I'll have to reduce this to one stream a week in a few months.
The user tree loads slowly because of a bug from how usernames are displayed. It's now cached per-user, so the first attempt to load it will be slow. After that the cache is filled until a new user arrives or rack::attack shoves it out of the cache. Probably it would be better to not use the "invited by you" helper on this page (it's redundant with the tree) and return to one cached version. PRs welcome. :)
Edit: Also the user tree loads slowly lately because of aggressive scrapers. Server load is typically <2 but I noticed this comment was taking a very long time to post and logged in to see it at 11.4, the highest I've seen. Looks like a couple aggressive scrapers at once, I'll see what I can filter out.
As something of a lurker, I still consider myself a lobste.rs user but wouldn't show up in that active users table (I guess until now!)
This is motivating me to engage a little more here.
Those activity graphs are interesting, I wonder why the drop in activity during 2020. I wouldn't imagine covid having an impact on a site like this
Yeah, I myself have these phases of commenting and then going to "sleep"/lurking mode for months.
I have found this surprising. I'd have considered myself more of a lurker than anything, but by these numbers I'd seemingly be in the top 25% of users by activity.
Yep. The entire web is built by outliers. The world is a museum of passion projects.
It would be cool to see a graph of votes cast versus comments posted. It would seem they were linearly proportional until recently when the number of votes increased by much more than the commenters, likely due to an increase in lurkers who vote I guess? Perhaps it was never linear but just not visible due to the log relation that you note?