Number of Posts In A Discussion By A User
Typically, interactions between users happen in thematic discussions. The number of posts in a discussion by a user shows how many posts each user created in one discussion on average.
Question answered by the metric
What is the number of posts a user creates in one discussion thread?
Steps to measure
To calculate the number of posts in a discussion by a user, one needs to do the following.
- For each user, calculate the number of discussions they have participated in a given month.
- Calculate the number of posts each user has created in a given month.
- Per user, calculate the number of posts to the number of discussion ratio.
- Take the average of the result.
Since there is a large group of users who post just one post and leave, the result will be skewed towards lower values. To avoid this, we recommend removing all users with just one post from the analysis. (On our side, we removed one-time posters from the dataset.)
Interpretation
We measure the number of posts from a user in one topic to see how deeply users are involved in the discussion on average. When a user posts more than one post in one topic, it indicates more lively communication and a full-fledged discussion. In general, the higher this value, the better. At the same time, some types of communities do not imply multiple posts in one topic from one author (for example, Q&A forums). In this case, the value of this metric will be close to one.