this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
803 points (99.0% liked)
Fediverse
28735 readers
202 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 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah when I showed the cop the graph of my speed before getting in my car to be 67000mph (speed of the earth around the sun) to 67080mphwhen I was driving it he couldn't see the difference so I didn't get the ticket.
Or sometimes choosing a common-sense reference makes sense.
Which isn't to say THIS one does, it doesn't, but the absolutism of "it's nerf or nothing" is a tad extreme.
Well, it does make sense, doesn't it?
What we're interested in is not the number of users, but the trends: whether the number is increasing or decreasing over time. Starting the axis at 0 would not be useful in this regard, as the trend would be almost completely obscured.
If the goal is to visualize growth trends, I don't think raw user counts are the correct value to track on the Y-axis at all. That's where my head was at when I said it doesn't make sense. Abusing the Y-axis to try and coax data out in this case is just a symptom of having the wrong measure.
Daily new users. Percent user growth.
There is visible growth in posts and comments, which is good. However, I've also started seeing spam posts.
For something like that, you need a special graph, and I forget the name because no one uses it.
Y axis is "percent growth" and the X axis isn't at the bottom, it's in the middle.
Like, the only way I can describe it is a line graph because it technically is, but there's some name done it.
Capitalism doesn't like it tho, because there's "red numbers" and red numbers scare investors
At some point recognisability is also worth something. I can immediately read this graph, I understand it, it's good.
Occasionally it's used in a confusing way where people assume it starts at zero despite it not being the case, and sometimes intentionally so. But that's just the case here.