Recently, I found Richard Millington’s post “Why Time To First Response Matters (the 18 hour rule)”. In that post Richard’s team analyzed a dataset of dozen of communities and found out that the percentage of users who post their second question in a community drops significantly after 18 hours. Since I have more than 200 communities in my dataset I decided to try to reproduce it. Here is what I’ve got.
This means that, at least based on the 200+ communities that I analysed, I can say that something like the 18-hour-rule exists, but not in each and every community and might be platform specific.
What I found is that 75% of all first responses get posted within 19 hours (the 90% threshold is reached in 200 hours.) Which means that if users do not answer someone’s question within the first day since posting, the odds that the question will ever be answered are getting low with each hour passed.
In terms of percentage of posting for the second time, in my dataset the average is 28%. It starts at 35% and then drops to 30% by the 20th hour. At 40-50 hours from the time of posting, the percentage of those asking for the second time drops at around 25%. It is not exactly 18-hour-rules, but the pattern is the same.
What I think is more important to understand is how the two factors from above play together. Here is a chart for one of the communities in my dataset.
The community has 77% of users asking only once, and 23% of those who ask more than once. What is important for us is how fast we reach the 23% threshold. What we see is that, indeed, most of the users who proceeded to ask the second question got an answer within 20-25 hours. So, my concussion is the same as Richard’s one: if you manage an online community, do your best to help users help each other fast!
Please let me know what you think! Does your community have any variation of the 18-hour rule?
To conduct the research above I added two new metrics, which are available in the app now: