I might be missing something, but why would a slac...

# random

[karelpeeters]

I might be missing something, but why would a slack group or a channel become less active when there are more people in it?

[dalexander]

Wildly speculating, but I imagine that a number of factors play a role. 1) There are people who will communicate in a smaller setting that won’t communicate in a larger setting. 2) The proportion of people in (1) scales such that you lose talkative people faster than you gain them after a certain point 3) When a Slack has a certain level of widespread-ness, it starts to attract more people as a percentage who never talk or ask a single question and are silent for the rest of their account’s existence on that Slack.

[dalexander]

And the silent majority (3) triggers more people to go in to (1) mode.

[karelpeeters]

Right, activity/person will surely go down. Bu the total activity?

[dalexander]

I think the total activity across all channels will go up because I suspect the curve is skewed to the right in the range of 0..10k users, and is on a per-channel basis. So there will be more, smaller, active channels, but the larger channels become quieter.

[karelpeeters]

Ah maybe activity is simply pushed to specific channels per-topic?

[dalexander]

ie. imagine peak activity is at 500 users (or whatever the number is). A Slack with 10k users can support more, specialized channels with 500 users. So total activity will be higher, but the activity would be lower in larger channels.

[dalexander]

Ah, yes, that’s a good idea too.

[dalexander]

I’m in wild-speculation mode here, so any suggestions are welcome =p

[karelpeeters]

It's just strange that the twitter post asserts it without any explanation.

[dalexander]

They did provide a graph. It’s hard to tell if there wasn’t some other cause though.

[karelpeeters]

It's hard to tell, maybe their community/group just peaked.

[dalexander]

Yeah, that’s entirely possible too. It’d be interesting to see the numbers for this Slack 🧌

[karelpeeters]

Actually I remember seeing some graphs, let me go look up the dashboard.

[karelpeeters]

https://kotlinlang.slack.com/stats#overview only goes back a month unfortunately.

[dalexander]

There’s a dropdown in the upper right that lets you go back all the way

[dalexander]

So an interesting measurement is before the google announcement vs. after. And while the number of users doubles, the number of users posting messages only goes up by about 40% and there’s a shift to more direct messaging usage