this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
1000 points (98.6% liked)
Fediverse
28381 readers
1612 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If you start at 0, you see exactly what you're supposed to: there is a rather negligible trend in the given timeframe.
That's the point. The number of users has very slightly declined in the past few months. Under the original plot, you have a lot of people (rightly) misinterpreting the data, and saying that a lot of users are leaving the site.
That's why you start at 0. So that people interpret the data correctly.
If you start at zero, the exact same data is shown as when there is a clearly labeled breakpoint. It contributes nothing other than obscuring the data points and scope of discussion is only for the past month. You're not making a cogent point.
Just like I said before, a 5% decline is not an insignificant drop or "very slightly declined." Expanding the scope of the argument to show that it's actually a far steeper decline in user engagement and then arguing the opposite point is misinterpreting the data. Expanding the scope just shows that the trends are continuously showing declining user engagement with no organic growth other than Reddit fucking up.
I've been asking myself the exact same thing.
The top level comment on this thread, to which you complained about graphical syntax, is discussing the MAU decline over the past 30 days.
You talk as if you don’t understand how plots work. If the change looks like a 90% drop, that’s how it’s going to be perceived.
Moreover, if you do start from 0 you instinctively see the 5% drop, and can make the conclusion that it’s big or small yourself. If you don’t do that, you need to calculate numbers. People don’t do that. They see line go down, and get the impression from that.
Any drop would look the same on the initial plot. 5%, drop 50% drop, 0.005% drop. The ’start your y axis at 0’ rule has a lot of exeptions, but this is not one of them. In fact, it’s the quintessential example of lying with a plot.
If you want to see the actual values for each timestep, there are better tools for that. Such as a table.
Explaining all of this feels bizarre. You are de facto trolling by this weird contrarianism.