Last time, we looked at how different types of events affect community engagement. But we didn’t mention one type of event that deserves its own post. Interviews with community members and company employees.
I love interviews because they’re one of the most effective ways to get people talking. In theory. Is that actually true in practice? That’s what we’re going to find out today.
The technical heavy lifting was done by Pavel Klykov, all kudos go to him.
The data for this analysis was provided by the SolPlex team. Together with them, we ran 13 interviews between November 2025 and February 2026: 8 with community members and 5 with employees. The interviews were published on Reddit, and we dropped the Reddit link into Discord, where all discussions took place.
For the analysis, we used three different approaches: what-if modeling to calculate the absolute numbers on the day of an interview, a MMM‑model to estimate the long‑term effect, and a frequentist model to check whether the effects we saw were due to chance.
Results
TL;DR: Do interviews impact the community and the interviewees?
- Yes. The number of messages and unique users in the community were up on interview days.
- No. At least in the short term, we found no clear evidence that the interviews affected the interviewees’ activity levels.
Does community activity increase on interview days?
In most cases, the number of messages and the number of active users on the day of an interview were above the baseline.
Please note, we’re not claiming strict statistical significance here, but the pattern held consistently in 9 out of 13 cases for messages and 10 out of 13 cases for unique users.
What else can we say based on the data? We can put a number on the impact.
On the day of the interview
On average, on interview days we saw 24% more users and 30% more messages than expected. In absolute terms, that’s 5 extra users and 25 extra messages.
The effect over the course of a month
Looking at the longer‑term impact of each interview, we observed an average increase of 5.1% in monthly active users and 19.1% more messages per month. (In absolute numbers, that works out to 69 extra messages and 18 extra users per month per interview.)
Do the interviewees themselves become more active on their interview day?
Some interviewees posted more on the day their interview went live, others posted less. But looking at all users as a group, we didn’t find any meaningful relationship between a user’s average daily activity and their activity on the day of their own interview.
What this means in practice
A bump in engagement on interview days and for a little while after is exactly what you’d expect, and that’s what we saw. What did surprise us was that the interviewees themselves didn’t always show up to join the discussion about their own posts.
Overall, we still believe that interviews are a powerful community‑building tool. If this got you thinking the same, here are a few useful links on the topic:
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How to unite people into a community? The interviews approach
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What is community engagement ? What community engagement techniques do you know?
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What is the minimum list of actions one needs to take on to build a gaming community effectively?
If you’re looking to grow your online community effectively, we’d love to help!