This post looks at 26,784 posts on Greystones Open Forum on Facebook from some different perspectives. This data snapshot was taken in September 2016, so it doesn’t contain anything posted since then.
Since the founding of the group in 2011, there have been more than 437 events and 7660 photos posted.
Basic Stats
- Average number of reactions per post. 8.6
- Average number of Comments per post: 6.6
- Most total reactions ever: 647
- Most ‘haha’ reactions ever: 110
There’s a power law
If we count up how many posts each user makes, and then plot a graph with that data, it looks like this:

This distribution of number of posts per user is interesting and appears to show a power law. This is similar to the Pareto principle, which is also known as the 80/20 rule.
The Pareto Principle

“Pareto showed that approximately 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population; Pareto developed the principle by observing that about 20% of the peapods in his garden contained 80% of the peas.”
Wikipedia
Power laws elsewhere
Here are some more things which show power law distributions:
- the sizes of craters on the moon and of solar flares
- the foraging pattern of various species
- the sizes of activity patterns of neuronal populations
- the frequencies of words in most languages
- frequencies of family names
- the species richness in clades of organisms
- the sizes of power outages
- criminal charges per convict
Top 10 users with the most posts
So you might be wondering, who posts the most on Greystones Open Forum?
Here are the top 10 most frequent posters, as of December 2017. This doesn’t count comments, only statuses.
Matthew Wilson 990 Margaret Kennedy 778 Jody Connaughton 507 Alberta Escay 499 Davida Spinderella Bradshaw 464 Louise Cardiff 398 Pablo Buerno 368 Valerie Bradshaw-Cullen 348 Peter Robbie 318 Fintan Spiteri 304
Funniest Post
The funniest post so far on Greystones Open Forum (according to the number of ‘haha’ reactions) was posted by Tom Scott on the 19th October 2016:
Who are we?
Focalise is a web design and digital marketing company based in Greystones.
Love Diagrams and all about them !