We've got an analysis of 3,992 comments. How were these selected? Right now, it's not very clear at all how this entire process worked, other than comments were served up, rated, and recorded.
Some questions I have, although this is not exhaustive:
- Did there need to be a certain number of comments?
- For their first answers, were they subject to moderation, such as not being an answer?
- What counts as a new user? Their first posts only?
- Did these comments come from the live database, with deleted comments gone, or shown?
If possible, a raw dump of the data would allow us to do our own analysis on it as well.
Imagine you are a new user to Stack Overflow, and you've just asked a question or posted your first answer
. For the comments, I'm wondering if only posts with >=X number of comments were selected.