Hello everyone! A few months ago, a now departed mod shared some statistical work that he did. While interesting, as a few commenters noted, the methodology was somewhat weak, leading to a likely over estimation of the overall response rates in the subreddit - although likely fairly accurate in its more narrow breakdowns. It was a very interesting project all the same though, and one that I felt needed further exploration, so for awhile now, in my spare time I've been working on what I hope to be a much more accurate look at the /r/AskHistorians subreddit from a statistical perspective.

To start with, I'll cut right to the chase. Popular threads, that is to say, threads which hit the top of the subreddit, consistently receive a substantive response over 90 percent of the time. Overall, looking at all threads in the subreddit, the response rate for the past year has been 39 percent (compared to the roughly 50 percent estimate of the earlier stat job).

Finally, a few general notes.

When I started this project, I didn't know what I was doing, and I was terrible about record keeping. I'm not kidding when I say it was me putting tally-marks on sticky-notes. It is quite possible I made errant marks here and there, but I don't believe there are likely to be any substantive mistakes large enough to significantly misrepresent any of the data here. I am... not a statistics major, although I did have to take a class in college on it. All the numbers are just plugged into Excel, and show whatever Excel spits back out. I rounded where it seemed appropriate, and I apologize if/where I screwed up the 'significant digits' or whatever other things like that...

When checking threads, the decision on the state of the thread was very much a snap judgement - "Is there a response or not?" I looked close enough to make sure it was an actual response, and not an unanswered follow-up, or a shitty joke that we just didn't see the first time around, but beyond that, there is no qualitative evaluation here. A just sufficiently good enough answer to avoid removal gets the same tally-mark that a 5 post magnum opus does. There were a few cases where the answer was deleted by the user, but it was clear that a) the answer had been approved by a mod (the check mark still remains) and b) it was originally a substantive response, as other users had responded to say "Thanks" or ask a follow up, etc. In these cases I did choose to count it as "Answered" as it was at the time, even if the user later chose to delete their account. That said, I don't believe there were more than a dozen of these cases that I recall.

Likewise, there is no qualitative evaluation of why a question went unanswered. A deep, thought-out, highly upvoted question which never got a response is no different in this study then the most incomprehensible, downvoted, or obvious query. Having sifted through quite literally thousands upon thousands of questions over the past month of compiling these stats I can say confidently that there is certainly correlation in (my subjective judgement of) question quality and how likely a response was, but I did not make any notations to that effect. Questions either have a response or they don't, and the why is not pondered.

As you will note, I used two core statistics when judging a thread, the "Response Rate" and the "Answer Rate". The first includes threads which receive a link to a relevant FAQ page, or a previous answer to the same question. There likely can be some debate over which is a more 'honest' stat to use, but I personally believe that the Response Rate is a better representation, as having already existent material does provide the Asker with what they wanted to know. When the linked answer was being linked by the author themselves though, I tallied that as an "Answer" rather than a "Response", as I believe that their presence, which allows for engagement, such as follow-ups or critiques, encapsulates one of the core aspects of getting an answer on the subreddit, so those posts rightfully fit under the "Answered" rubric.

I also calculated the "Ignored Rate", which is threads with NO comments, period, removed or otherwise, and the "Insufficient" rate, which is threads with comments, but neither an answer or a response. This is perhaps the least precise statistic though, since as in other cases there is no qualitative evaluation of what those comment(s) were, so it might be a removed joke, or it might be an unanswered follow up question, or any other number of non-answering possibilities.

Finally, as I said, I have stared at alot of threads to do this. Roughly 10,000 or so (and more to come as I do want to go back further eventually, as well as keep the numbers current going forward). The statistics only represent one aspect of how to quantify what my takeaways were from doing so. I'm more than happy to answer any questions, best that I can, about other thoughts and takeaways I have gained from the insight of doing so.

So now, without further ado, let us get on to the statistics themselves.

The first group of statistics is a study of the Top Posts for a given month. This evaluates the likelihood of responses to the 50 most upvoted threads of a given month, which roughly approximates the threads most likely to have hit the top spot in the sub for that month, and thus be visible on /r/All, or /r/Frontpage. It also evaluates the time in which it took answers to arrive.

TABLE I: Monthly Top Thread Statistics

1. Response Rate is the percentage of questions which receive a response of either an answer, or a link to a previous thread or FAQ section. Other visible responses such as follow up questions are not counted here. 2. Answer Rate is the percentage of questions which receive an answer, excluding responses which link to previous threads or the FAQ, except in cases where it is the original author linking. 3. Time is for the first visible answer that appeared. This excludes comments which are links, and does not factor questions which remained unanswered. When averaging, I excludes outlier threads where the answer was >48 hours after posting. Minimum and maximum only note cases where there was an answer, not a link.

As you can see, the response rate has always remained over 90 percent, and the answer rate has dipped slightly below a few times, but generally stays in the 90s as well. 2017 is slightly lower than things were in 2016, but keep in mind that 2 percentages points represent only a single thread, so it is minor. Interestingly though, the time has gone up somewhat over the past year, although February being a big outlier definitely is screwing up those 2017 numbers!

One interesting thing to note is that generally, the small number which did go without any response were the ones near the lower end of the list here. It almost never happened in the Top 10, and quite rarely even in the Top 20, which helps to further reinforce that popular questions almost always get answered. It just sometimes can take over a day.

As for the questions which recieved no response at all, I did not do any qualitative analysis as to why, but I would note that there are trends in what leads to a question going unanswered despite being very popular. The topic as there are definitely some fields which are just poorly covered by contributors on reddit. And in a few cases, the question struck me as neigh unanswerable for various reasons.

The Second Group of stats is intended to provide a larger snapshot of the subreddit as a whole, highlighting for each month seven days, chosen semi-randomly, to ensure that there is one Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. for every month. This is a total of 84 days evaluated, or 23 percent of the year if you prefer. I've broken it into two parts, one is raw numbers and one is percentages.

TABLE II: Monthly Snapshot by Numbers

Month | Total Resp.^4 | Total Answer | Total Insufficient^5 | Total Ignored^6 | Total Threads | ---|---|----|----|----|----|----| 2016-05 | 351 | 336 | 132 | 335 | 818 | 2016-06 | 329 | 309 | 119 | 278 | 726 | 2016-07 | 317 | 297 | 136 | 297 | 750 | 2016-08 | 310 | 286 | 127 | 351 | 788 | 2016-09 | 303 | 278 | 119 | 346 | 768 | 2016-10 | 284 | 270 | 121 | 337 | 742 | 2016-11 | 303 | 283 | 138 | 419 | 860 | 2016-12 | 333 | 302 | 128 | 360 | 821 | 2017-01 | 352 | 333 | 120 | 411 | 883 | 2017-02 | 319 | 295 | 143 | 442 | 904 | 2017-03 | 301 | 273 | 143 | 440 | 884 | 2017-04 | 333 | 293 | 147 | 376 | 856 | TOTAL Checked | 3835 | 3555 | 1573 | 4392 | 9800 | 365 Projection^7 | 16664 | 15447 | 6835 | 19084 | 42583 | AVERAGE/Week | 319.58 | 296.25 | 131.08 | 366 | 816.67 | MEDIAN/Week | 318 | 2934 | 130 | 355.5 | 819.5 | AVERAGE/Day | 45.65 | 42.32 | 18.77 | 52.29 | 116.67 |

And the same stats as percentages, rather than the raw numbers:

TABLE III: Monthly Snapshot by Percent

Month | Average Threads Per Day | Response Rate | Answer Rate | Insufficient Rate | Ignored Rate | ---|---|----|----|----|----|----| 2016-05 | 116.86 | 0.43 | 0.41 | 0.16 | 0.41 | 2016-06 | 103.71 | 0.45 | 0.43 | 0.16 | 0.38 | 2016-07 | 107.14 | 0.42 | 0.4 | 0.18 | 0.4 | 2016-08 | 112.57 | 0.39 | 0.36 | 0.16 | 0.45 | 2016-09 | 109.71 | 0.39 | 0.36 | 0.15 | 0.45 | 2016-10 | 106 | 0.38 | 0.36 | 0.16 | 0.45 | 2016-11 | 122.86 | 0.35 | 0.33 | 0.16 | 0.49 | 2016-12 | 117.29 | 0.41 | 0.37 | 0.16 | 0.44 | 2017-01 | 126.14 | 0.4 | 0.38 | 0.14 | 0.47 | 2017-02 | 129.14 | 0.35 | 0.33 | 0.16 | 0.49 | 2017-03 | 126.29 | 0.34 | 0.31 | 0.16 | 0.5 | 2017-04 | 122.29 | 0.39 | 0.34 | 0.17 | 0.44 | Average Year | 116.67 | 0.39 | 0.37 | 0.16 | 0.45 | Median | 117.08 | 0.39 | 0.36 | 0.16 | 0.45 |

4. Total excludes META and Feature threads from the count.

5. Insufficient: This is the questions which did receive replies, but either none remain visible, or else what is visible is not an attempt to answer the question, such as mod warnings, or unanswered follow-ups.

6. Ignored: This covers questions which received no comments at all, visible or otherwise. It also does not make any judgement on whether the question was answerable, or well phrased.

7. 365 Projection extrapolates these numbers to estimate the stats over the entire year period, assuming that it remains consistent with these numbers of course.

Hello,

I took four years of German in HS and college. I've recently been doing a bit of online reading about the Germanic Peoples, and it's made be very curious about the answer to my question.