[Thanks to msh210 for telling me how to make these calculations.1]
I checked the average comments per post of the top 8 Stack Exchange Sites, to compare to Mi Yodeya:
Stack Overflow
- 89,126,736 comments
- 51,068,664 posts
- 1.75 comments per post
Mathematics
- 5,843,848 comments
- 2,834,045 posts
- 2.06 comments per post
Super User
- 1,995,887 comments
- 1,334,768 posts
- 1.5 comments per post
Ask Ubuntu
- 1,714,914 comments
- 1,050,246 posts
- 1.63 comments per post
Server Fault
- 1,189,351 comments
- 918,547 posts
- 1.29 comments per post
English Language & Usage
- 1,089,054 comments
- 452,229 posts
- 2.41 comments per post
Arqade
- 475,061 comments
- 334,319 posts
- 1.42 comments per post
Ask Different
- 421,383 comments
- 328,856 posts
- 1.28 comments per post
Mi Yodeya
- 305,154 comments
- 93,414 posts
- 3.27 comments per post
As you can see, Mi Yodeya out-comments the other sites by a tremendous amount. The combined average of those 8 sites is 1.67 compared to Mi Yodeya's 3.27. I.e. Mi Yodeya has just under twice the average amount of average comments.
In case the results of the above survey are not representative because those sites are much bigger than Mi Yodeya, I checked a couple of similar sites as well
Photography
- 184,484 comments
- 99,626 posts
- 1.85 comments per post
Philosophy
- 141,149 comments
- 53,390 posts
- 2.64 comments per posts
Islam
83,083 comments
48,882 posts
1.7 comments per post
Korean Language
4,004 comments
3,587 posts
1.12 comments per post
Here too the numbers are well below Mi Yodeya, with a combined average of 1.83 comments per post. The total average of both groups is 1.71 comments per post.
- Is this a good thing, a bad thing, or neither?
- Is there a particular reason, or reasons, why Mi Yodeya generates many more comments per post? E.g. the nature of the content is such that it usually requires more clarification, or it easily generates tangential discussions.
- Should anything be done about this?
I personally like comments, and I think there are many comments that are very useful. (Note that while I don't have real data for this, my impression from checking the other sites was that Mi Yodeya also has a lot more active comments. I.e. it's not just that Mi Yodeya generates thousands of useless comments that are then deleted; it also generates useful comments that are kept. Unless that's just because of differences in moderation?)
What does everyone else think?
1. Note that the numbers may be off by a fraction of a percent because it is possible that I looked at the second-to-most-recent post instead of the most recent post, or it is possible that a few more posts or comments have gone up since I collected the data. None of that should affect the results in anything remotely close to a significant way.