Precious Daily Voting Pattern Analysis

As Custodian of the community curation project Precious The Silver Mermaid I need to keep an eye on the Voting Power (VP) of the @ssg-community account from which it runs. For the last couple of years I’ve needed to intervene regularly to spend extra VP if it gets too close to 100% because nobody wants to see VP wasted. That’s usually involved throwing some manual Votes onto the Comments of our authors posts to encourage a bit of engagement amongst the community supporters and followers….but for the last few weeks I haven’t needed to do this.

Of course this is good news because it means that our community is creating a steady flow of content for us all to enjoy and there is therefore plenty of good stuff for Precious to vote on. I’ve noticed that her VP has consistently fluctuated between about 90% to 95% recently - which is a real sweet spot and probably where everyone wants their VP to be. Needless to say I think she’s running pretty smoothly and the members seem to be generally happy, so that’s all good. However, things could always be better!

This week I wanted to dig into the Hive SQL Database run by that quiet achiever @arcange so that I could to do some analysis and make sure that my eyes weren’t deceiving me. Today I’ve pulled out the Daily Voting Data to have a good look to see if there are some days that are better than others or whether there is anything in particular that I should look out for or expect. The chart below shows the last 4 weeks from Sunday to Saturday with all of the cumulative Vote Weights distributed by @ssg-community on each day. NOTE – The times are in GMT so some of our members would be earlier or later each day, but I figure this tends to average out across the membership because GMT is geographically central.

The first thing that I noticed is that Sundays seem to be a bit consistently below average. This matches my experience as I’ve often needed to pay particular attention to VP over the weekend to make sure it doesn’t hit 100%. By contrast, Mondays are relatively strong as are Thursdays. Fridays and Wednesdays seem to be pretty consistently hitting the sweet spot around that 1000%-1100% mark, while Tuesdays and Saturdays are highly variant. I don’t really know what to make of that variance, but it’s good to know.

Overall I’d love to see those lines nice and level because the consistency makes management easier, but I’m pretty comfortable overall that the project is running smoothly and doing its job such that the VP is just fluctuating up and down as it needs to without hitting 100%. I don’t want to upset the Apple Cart but I do have a few ideas on how we might take Precious to the next level. I’ll try to knock some rough edges off those ideas, flesh them out a bit and write about them in coming days to see if I can get any of them to stick.