LiveJournal Statistics

[queerbychoice]

Do you ever contemplate disturbing numbers like how, if I remain on LiveJournal for the next thirty years and continue being added and removed by people at the same rate I have been for the past 25 months, when I'm 58 years old I will be on the friends lists of 1,641 people? I mean, how will we all keep up with even reading our own entries' comment pages? Will LiveJournal explode?

Comments

[jaq.livejournal.com]

I don't really read lots of the entries on my list already :-/ Maybe I should sort.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

I read them all obsessively, but find myself needing to thin out my friends list regularly to be capable of it.

[toppermost.livejournal.com]

how did you make that GRAPH!!! it's amazing!

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

I just added up the numbers from joule and typed them into a spreadsheet program (I used Lotus, but Microsoft Excel or any number of other programs should be able to handle it) and then clicked "Generate graph."

[mobledqueen.livejournal.com]

...someone here is recently unemployed....

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

Everyone should read Tufte (http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=4-0961392142-0).

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

How would he rate my graph?

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

Not the worst ever, but far from the best. Dark gridlines, wide bars, and bright colors are visual distractions that make it harder to grok the numbers, the repetition of years is redundant, measuring friends added and removed in the same direction is confusing, and using colors and a key is unnecessary indirection.

Tufte would probably do it so that friends added and friends removed went in opposite directions, either above and below the zero line or using the end of one as the baseline of the other; so that they were bare lines rather than colored bars; and with grid lines in a very light gray so that you could see them if you wanted to but they didn't jump out at you. Years would not be appended to month names, but rather would be placed as dividing lines between months or otherwise as non-redundant context for the months.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

If the friends added and removed were in different directions, though, you couldn't as easily compare which was higher.

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

If they were in opposite directions around the zero line, it should still be pretty easy. If you used the tip of "friends added" as the baseline for "friends removed" or vice versa, you'd have an excellent illustration of the relative sizes and net change, at the cost of losing absolute scale and having a little harder time extracting the numerical value. I'm not sure which of those is the better approach, which is why I mentioned both; but both do a better job of letting you follow change from month to month (because the two data don't get in each other's way), which is presumably the goal.

Convincing you of these things in words without accompanying graphs to show what I mean is hard, which is why I always grunt and point at Tufte.

[imperfectmanx.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, i checked that out, and it only goes back to 8th august,2004 for me, I know there was lots of adding and dropping prior to that. And why are some of the m black, and the other's blue? Is it the protected versus the public journals?

Cool graph btw

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Joule goes back to whenever was the first time that you (or somebody) first looked up your username in it. The dates that show up in Joule are all dates when somebody looked up your username in it - not necessarily the actual dates that a person added or removed you, just whatever's changed since the last time someone checked your username using Joule.

As for the colors, it's just that the links you've recently visited show up in black and the other links show up in blue.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Quite possibly me. :p

[donutgirl.livejournal.com]

I only add about one person a month, maybe less. And I lose even less frequently... I don't actually find it very easy to find people I want to read on a daily basis.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

...There's also a sort of a "death rate" of journals to pay attention to - some people will add you, then just run away from livejournal without deleting their friends or their journals. Other times people will just stop reading you without deleting you.

Personally I manage two lists - a "people I read" list and an "other people" list. It's because sometimes I decide there's no reason for someone to not have access to friends-locked entries, but decide that for some reason there's no point in actually reading them when I have such a hard time keeping up with livejournal in the first place. I also don't read most communities regularly (yours is actually a notable exception)... either too high-traffic or too many stupid people on them that make me want to scream.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

I'm hoping that Brad hurries up and implements that plan to replace the Friends List with separate lists for "I read these people's entries" versus "I don't mind letting these people read my locked entries. Whenever he gets around to doing that, I'll give all my Friend-of list access to my locked entries. In the meantime, though, they just can't read them, because adding them when I don't intend to read them would just make me feel too much like I was deceiving them.