this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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You gotta stop counting total users. Only active users should be counted. We know there's utterly massive numbers of bots being created. Plus people have multiple accounts from trying out different instances even if they'll only use one.
True. I've created at least 4, myself.
People love vanity metrics, though.
Look, I’ve quit Reddit because fuck spez, and now have confirmation bias that needs answering. Just…let me have this.
But the bot + duplicate account numbers keep going up and I really like exponential growth
I have manually counted 20 so far
Yeah, I created an account on a difference instance just because I didn't know how to post in a community from a different (but federated) instance in this instance.
True, I have 9 accounts so far between instances... I don't think I'll make anymore I'm quite comfortable now, but yeah, I inflated the stats. Sorry..
Active users isn't perfect either, for two reasons:
Bot accounts can be actively doing things -- in fact, it's likely that they will do so at some point to build legitimacy. We had someone farming regularly-created bot accounts back on /r/europe around the time I left, reposting slightly-mangled old comments and slightly cropped and rotated old highly-upvoted old images. Dozens of accounts a day.
Some (human) users are just going to lurk, and won't become active users.
It may be an input into a better estimate, and may be better than total users at this point, but it isn't the "right" number either, and I would wager that it will start to increasingly deviate from the legitimate number if people start activating bots.