Livejournal population statistics, round 2.
It seems like every time LJ does something stupid I get inspired to write another population post. I tried tackling LJ's gender balance back in November in this post in lj_research, but the raw data makes no sense and I sort of gave up. Oh well.
Today I'm going to update the population post I made in August of last year. I'm only going to show data from Jan 1 ( Read more... )
Part of this is straightforward demographics... but part of it is site design. There's not enough being done to encourage new users to integrate more completely into the pre-existing community.
As a result, if you were to map LJ as connections, both the older and the newer generation of LJ are increasingly less connected.
It's a bit like saying that the patient on the right is perfectly healthy, even though both have a brain. In this case, instead of mapping brain activity levels based on synaptic connections between the neurons, we're looking at total health based on connections between users.
My point is that the same thing essentially is happening, even though new users / neurons are still being created.
We're not at the situation on the right yet, but we're not at the picture on the left either. A lot of the bloom has come off the rose, the average perceived activity level is considerably less, and there will likely come a point where whole sections of the site / friends groupings / communities start to shut down from this process.
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