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Some time has passed since D-day (the 'D' stands for DeHNQisation) happened 16 October 2018. Time to take a closer look at the site's stats and what effects the HNQ and its absence have had on the community.

Traffic

Let's start with the obvious one. HNQ produces a lot of traffic. No HNQ means a part of that traffic doesn't come to IPS. We can see that in the amount of page views.

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This seems to be stable again. But let's look beyond the views and take a look at the other stats.

The other stats

Posts

Posts suffered initially, but appear to have recovered to a point. It's definitely not as bad as the first few days after D-day.

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Especially the Questions per day have bounced back quite nicely. This makes sense. HNQ brings people to already existing questions, causing them to answer, not necessarily ask additional questions.

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Votes

A similar effect can be seen with the votes. Users coming from the HNQ tend to lack the rep required to downvote. This can be seen in the amount of daily up and downvotes per pageview:

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Looking at the average up and downvote per answer we see a similar story:

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Deletions

So we see that the amount of downvotes per answer has dropped slightly. Does this mean that the quality of the answers we get has increased? If we look at the fraction of answers that has been deleted each day, we can see that this has decreased as well.

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So while the amount of (nondeleted) answers has gone down, so too has the fraction of answers that has been deleted, part of which presumably due to low quality.

Comments

It's late, and personally I'm not too familiar with the comment side of SEDE. If someone has some insights to the amount of deleted comments per post or something like that, feel free to add that here.

Protections

The amount of protected questions would be interesting too. I might add that tomorrow.

Conclusion

While the traffic on IPS has gone down, the daily questions don't appear to have suffered too badly, and the amount of daily answers per question has gone down from a absurdly high amount, to an arguably more normal amount. The quality appears to have gone up as well. Whether this weighs up against one another, I will leave to you to decide.

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  • 2
    This is some nice analysis. I'd like to see what the data looks like after more than two weeks have passed.
    – sphennings
    Nov 2, 2018 at 1:39
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    About the Questions per day since D-Day: Several users have posted questions after that day with the main intention of creating content for this stack, to fight against the reduction in page views. I'm not saying their questions were too forced, or too hypothetical, but that graph should be taken with a grain of salt. The questions-per-day-graph in a month will tell us a truer truth. It is very early for any kind of statistical data anyway, it's only been half a month. While some information can be gained from these graphs, waiting a little longer will result in better information IMO.
    – kscherrer
    Nov 2, 2018 at 8:45
  • Please could you add some image descriptions? For anyone who can't see the images, whatever the reason, it is a bit difficult to follow the sense of the post. Just a brief indication is enough, like 'Chart shows daily views for dd/mm decline'.
    – user9837
    Nov 5, 2018 at 14:07

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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During our respite from HNQ, community moderation efforts have been focused on cleaning up older questions on the site. This included deleting a lot of VLQ answers on old HNQ messes.

  • Can we account for this cleanup in the data somehow?

  • Is this cleanup potentially skewing data you're working on?

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  • Yeah, that could affect the data on deleted posts. As of now, those values don't care about when the post was deleted, only about when the post was made. I could fix that, but at the same time it does say something about the quality of the post at the time it was made (according to today's standards).
    – JAD
    Nov 2, 2018 at 5:38
  • oh, That actually avoids the concern i had, that the stat was based on deletion time. It would be interesting to also look at what posted we have deleted this week and how they were from HNQ crapstorm questions
    – spiral succulent
    Nov 2, 2018 at 17:50
  • If you are done in your cleaning, you can just wait 2weeks/1month and refresh stat to see if the what is supposed is confirmed, aniway, 3 weeks from "D" day seems a bit soon aniway.
    – Walfrat
    Nov 7, 2018 at 15:54

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