The community metrics in Area 51 give a great impression of an SE community health.
Also, I've seen the following statement from a research paper:
An interesting characteristic of SO is that about half of its users makes only one contribution to the platform in total.
While I have not verified this for all communities, browsing users in a couple of communities seems to confirm this statement so I choose to trust the paper and assume this phenomenon indeed generally applies. I can't also estimate how even/uneven the distribution of this average value is between communities.
Then as I consider this (maybe wrongly) to be potentially an important community health characteristic, I ask myself whether the Area 51 metrics imply this somehow, or not?
Why I think it's important: imagine you have some hot topic, so thousands of people join in the beginning, that you have some user base which produces good community health, but the total number of users seen on community properties page might be misleading? Like, "50000 users, 5000 daily active" seems like the community is not doing well even if it has good rating, but in fact it's not so big due to the one day flies effect?
So what I would like to know:
- a. does this already goes into Area 51 metrics, but I do not see it
- b. this is currently not part of Area 51 metrics for some reason.
If a, please point me to that. For b, I'm curious for argumentation whether it would be a fairness/transparency benefit (more well balanced rating and comparability) either an undesired effect like setting all ratings back thus achieving no measurable benefit.
