Agosagror

I was playing around with Lemmy statistics the other day, and I decided to take the number of comments per post. Essentially a measure of engagement – the higher the number the more engaging the post is. Or in other words how many people were pissed off enough to comment, or had something they felt like sharing. The average for every single Lemmy instance was 8.208262964 comments per post.

So I modeled that with a Poisson distribution, in stats terms X~Po(8.20826), then found the critical regions assuming that anything that had a less than 5% chance of happening, is important. In other words 5% is the significance level. The critical regions are the region either side of the distribution where the probability of ending up in those regions is less than 5%. These critical regions on the lower tail are, 4 comments and on the upper tail is 13 comments, what this means is that if you get less than 4 comments or more than 13 comments, that's a meaningful value. So I chose to interpret those results as meaning that if you get 5 or less comments than your post is "a bad post", or if you get 13 or more than your post is "a good post". A good post here is litterally just "got a lot of comments than expected of a typical post", vice versa for "a bad post".

You will notice that this is quite rudimentary, like what about when the Americans are asleep, most posts do worse then. That's not accounted for here, because it increases the complexity beyond what I can really handle in a post.

To give you an idea of a more sweeping internet trend, the adage 1% 9% 90%, where 1% do the posting, 9% do the commenting, and 90% are lurkers – assuming each person does an average of 1 thing a day, suggests that c/p should be about 9 for all sites regardless of size.

Now what is more interesting is that comments per post varies by instance, lemmy.world for example has an engagement of 9.5 c/p and lemmy.ml has 4.8 c/p, this means that a “good post” on .ml is a post that gets 9 comments, whilst a “good post” on .world has to get 15 comments. On hexbear.net, you need 20 comments, to be a “good post”. I got the numbers for instance level comments and posts from here

This is a little bit silly, since a “good post”, by this metric, is really just a post that baits lots and lots of engagement, specifically in the form of comments – so if you are reading this you should comment, otherwise you are an awful person. No matter how meaningless the comment.

Anyway I thought that was cool.

EDIT: I've cleared up a lot of the wording and tried to make it clearer as to what I am actually doing.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/41887016

I have attempted to read Anarchist books before. I found it difficult to read, boring, laborious, dated, and frankly the entire notion of Anarchist literature felt like it was missing the point of it’s subject matter. I will say that I am also someone who struggles to read a lot or at all, just for a point of comparison.

Then I stumbled into this book. It was a fucking amazing read, I could not put it away. Now it’s a biography, and that to me kind of sucked, as I had thought that biographies were what old people read in their infinite spare time, once they had finished every other book in the universe. That said, the guy’s life could just be fiction book. So does it really matter?

The book admittedly romanticizes a lot of nuance of Ben’s life away. The portrayal of street life, is made out be excited freedom balanced with the hardship of the road. Where that balance definitely feels further towards the freedom end of the spectrum. But it also leans into other challenges Ben faces latter in life, such as being deemed less important to the abortion rights movement by the very women he is fighting for, because he’s male. Unlike fiction and like real life the book doesn’t exactly have a happy ending. In large part because of Reitman’s relationship with Emma Goldman, but also because real life sucks.

What I am really saying is that for someone who always thought of themselves as an Anarchist, this book was the first one that I was truly able to sit down and read to completion without feeling like a lullaby was playing over my head. So I highly recommend it to anyone who read the first paragraph of this, and went – “yeah that’s me”.

For a slightly more broad point, this book is a really good example of actions speaking louder than words. I personally feel that the actions discussed here present a far more compelling argument against the state and capital than any theoretical guide ever could.

Link to download the book as a PDF

I have attempted to read Anarchist books before. I found it difficult to read, boring, laborious, dated, and frankly the entire notion of Anarchist literature felt like it was missing the point of it’s subject matter. I will say that I am also someone who struggles to read a lot or at all, just for a point of comparison.

Then I stumbled into this book. It was a fucking amazing read, I could not put it away. Now it’s a biography, and that to me kind of sucked, as I had thought that biographies were what old people read in their infinite spare time, once they had finished every other book in the universe. That said, the guy’s life could just be fiction book. So does it really matter?

The book admittedly romanticizes a lot of nuance of Ben’s life away. The portrayal of street life, is made out be excited freedom balanced with the hardship of the road. Where that balance definitely feels further towards the freedom end of the spectrum. But it also leans into other challenges Ben faces latter in life, such as being deemed less important to the abortion rights movement by the very women he is fighting for, because he’s male. Unlike fiction and like real life the book doesn’t exactly have a happy ending. In large part because of Reitman’s relationship with Emma Goldman, but also because real life sucks.

What I am really saying is that for someone who always thought of themselves as an Anarchist, this book was the first one that I was truly able to sit down and read to completion without feeling like a lullaby was playing over my head. So I highly recommend it to anyone who read the first paragraph of this, and went – “yeah that’s me”.

For a slightly more broad point, this book is a really good example of actions speaking louder than words. I personally feel that the actions discussed here present a far more compelling argument against the state and capital than any theoretical guide ever could.

My router was playing up, initially I couldn't get my phone to connect, which I thought was my fault - since I started running grapheneOS but then other devices stop connecting and then those that were connected couldn't access certain sites etc.

I still live at home, so my mum who isn't technologically literate phoned the ISP, and attempted to fix it. Turns out it just needed a reset, as the last time it had been reset was 8 years ago.

What was a surprise was that the ISP guy told my mum how many devices were connected to the internet. She found that immensely creepy.

I doubt there's anything I can do to reduce the trust burden with an ISP, beyond telling my mum to use a VPN. My threat model always had ISPs as a risk that had to be taken, however I am curious as to if there is anything at all that can be done! That's also not immensely impractical?