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:

A graph of the distribution of number of posts per user on Greystones Open Forum, which shows a power law
Number of posts per user

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

Photo of Vilfredo Pareto
Vilfredo Pareto 1848 – 1923

“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?

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