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Observations on point accumulation by the top 60 Element 14 members

Instructorman

Observations on point accumulation by the top 60 members in Element 14

Back in October of 2015 Element 14 announced its first Hertz level member, who, at the time, was .  The Hertz level starts at 100,000 points, which in the Element14 community is really a lot of points.  Accumulating that many points is no easy feat, as I will illustrate in this blog.

On the day I read the announcement, just over a year ago, I checked my point accumulation and found I had 7051 points, placing me 61st in line to the throne.  I wondered about how the community in general was doing in terms of point accumulation because point accumulation can be a good proxy indication of member participation.

 

Point accumulation is not 100% correlated with member participation.  A strong case supporting this assertion can be found in the very prolific and highly participatory   who is not among the top 60 members ranked in the chart below. From April 2016 to October 2016 Ben slipped from 64th to 81st position. Clearly, this does not mean Ben has been participating less over the last year, it means that he has been concentrating on making valuable contributions through The Ben Heck Show.  I think it is quite possible that Ben's contribution to the community through The Ben Heck Show has inspired many members to increase their participation, helping them move up the ranking scale.

 

Nevertheless, observing point accumulation should provide the temperature of member activity and plotting member activity over time should provide insight into the climate of the community.  With this hypothesis in mind I started a spreadsheet to record the point accumulation of the top 60 members in the community longitudinally, or, over time.  I could have selected the first 100, or the top 50, but because I was sitting just on the other side of 60 I arbitrarily decided to track the top 60 members.  I have maintained the spreadsheet for the last year and would like to share the chart below with the community because I believe other members and element14 administrators might find it interesting.

 

The process I used to gather data for the spreadsheet is pretty straightforward, if perhaps a little cumbersome.  It went like this:

  1. Log into my E14 account
  2. Select Reputation and Points from the drop down menu next to my name.
  3. Select Ranking from the Activities list on the left side of the screen. Doing this brings up a screen that shows your point accumulation and rank in the middle of a field, with the 5 members ranked above you and the 5 members ranked  below you arranged in a column.
  4. Record point accumulation and rank for everyone shown on the screen in the spreadsheet.
  5. Select the member at the top of the screen.
  6. From the More drop down menu, select Reputation
  7. From the Activity list, select Ranking.  This will produce a screen of ranking information with the selected member placed in the middle of the field. Repeat from step 4 until the rank of the member at the top of the list equals one.

 

For reference here is a link to the point accumulation rules and the levels currently established by element14.

 

The chart below illustrates the progress in point accumulation for the top 60 members of the element 14 community from October 27, 2015 to October 27, 2016.

The vertical axis represents the number of points accumulated, obtained via the method described above.  The horizontal axis represents member ranking from 1 to 60,  The third axis, the depth axis, contains a series of snapshots taken through the year, each one labelled with the date the snapshot was taken.

image

 

Several observations can be made from this chart.

 

First, the vertical axis is pretty much asymptotic around the top point accumulator. There isn't enough data on the horizontal axis to confirm this, but it looks like the horizontal axis is pretty much asymptotic to member rank as the rank number increases above 50 or so. I explored a bit well beyond the 60th ranked member to see what the chart would look like out there.  Now I couldn't determine exactly how many members there are in the Element14 community because odd things happen when member rank numbers get into 5 and 6 digit territory.  For example, I know of three members that have less than 100 points accumulated.  These members have ranking numbers ranging from around 36,000th to around 228,000th.  So there are probably at least 228,000 members in the database. However, the ranking system breaks down at high rank numbers because multiple members have the same rank position if they have the same low point accumulation number. For example, at least 6 members share rank position 31,851.

 

From examination of the data set gathered over a year, I believe I see a very large number of inactive, or barely active members, and a small clutch of moderately to highly active members, likely under 200 in total. I may be wrong.  The data set I gathered is incomplete, so I am making inferences and my conclusions are certainly open to debate. The chart does not show this well, but the raw data shows that some members shoot up through the ranks over a relatively short period of time, then stop advancing.  Others have steady point accumulation over time, using various participation strategies, advancing up the rank at various paces.  None of the members on the chart have activity levels as frenetic as the levels achieved by the top three members.

 

As can be seen from the chart, the top three members are very active.  The number 1 position has advanced by 44,598 points in the one year time span displayed in the chart.  Ownership of the top member position, by the way, has changed hands several times among the top three.

 

Here is a question:  If Element14, as a community, has a desire to increase awareness and participation in electronics/computing as a hobby or as a career, should more be done to encourage participation among the many thousands of inactive or barely active members?  Is this a topic of interest to the membership?

  • So the question is points and why some do not participate? In my case, I enjoy the time spent here versus a video game or Facebook time. I think I made a good exchange considering all the people I meet here.  It also follows the rule that 20% of the people generate 80% of the traffic. But in this case it more like 10 90.

    Thanks,

    Clem

  • Well, it depends on what you consider "active".  Some people have projects that are worked on a sporadic basis due to life getting in the way! 

     

    Granted there are probably some folks that just signed up for an answer to a homework problem, but there are probably others that signed up, looked for a specific piece of information, maybe asked a question or two and then life got in the way of what they are working on. 

     

    Speaking from personal experience, I signed up looking for some advice, asked a couple of questions, browsed the articles, and then had no time to work on my project for over a month.

  • in reply to Instructorman

    Ditto.. I had to set up a twitter account for one of the element14 contests, but that is the only time I've used it. Facebook is for tracking kids activities and finding long lost school mates. (once per year or less)

    There used to be more debate when was active, but I'm not sure many topics here are going to generate a lot of debate.

    Most active members seem quite different from each other to me, but there is a universal characteristic that keeps them active here.

    The way I would put it is an inherent realization that there is satisfaction available from participating here. Regardless of how much effort is required to obtain a little satisfaction, there is enough to keep us engaged. Like the extensive effort you had to expend to generate the stats above - it garnered 8 "Likes". Which is good by forum standards, but it takes a certain type of person to feel that effort was worthwhile. Without that type of person, this place would be a ghost forum. So keep up the great work.

    Some people need immediate, overwhelming gratification, some can stay engaged for long term goals. Engaging here is like putting money in the bank, eventually the interest starts to add up.

    ECHO CHAMBER .... echo chamber ... chamber ... not so much - not much to learn in an echo chamber....

  • in reply to dougw

    Interesting insights Douglas.  It seems there may be something about the structure and membership of E14 that appeals to a certain type of person - the literate geek, perhaps, or the tinkering techie?  Labels are bad because the never seem to be wholly inclusive and they always risk conveying unintended offense.  Do you think the active members in E14 are pretty homogenous?  Is there much collegial debate, or has the community taken on characteristics of an on-line echo chamber?

     

    BTW, I don't have a Twitter account, and have no intention of getting one.  I only keep a Facebook account to keep up to date on what my kids are doing.

  • Great work Mark,

    It is always interesting to obtain insight into the participation statistics for this forum.

    The members and their activities are one of the big reasons that make this site so interesting, so their participation is crucial to our level of enjoyment. Any insight we can gain into understanding participation and how to increase it is important and interesting in its own right.

    When looking for examples of how to increase participation, there aren't any better examples than e14, so there aren't obvious things missing.

    Social media like Twitter and Facebook may have much higher participation, but the content is not of the same caliber, and I'm not sure adding a more social aspect here would have a big beneficial effect. It might, but I suspect the members here are not generally the type to tweet 100 times per day.