Forums / Discussion / General

INTRODUCTION

In cooperation with several other KYM users, just about a year after beginning this, I present to you all the best open studies KYM has and probably ever will have on the userbase, entries, forums, images, and comments; as well as a brief history of KYM. We've put a lot of work into this, so I hope you all enjoy it.

First, I want to give credit to those who deserve it.

The heads of the project, in order of joining:

• Rivers. I came up with the original idea: a giant thread about numerous KYM stats. I collected some data and did most the writing for this thread.
• Muffinlicious. He collected data, did some programming, and helped with some of the ideas for this.
• Jack the Dipper. He made a huge amount of this possible. He came up with numerous ideas for various parts of it, and collected an extraordinary amount of data.

Various major contributors to the project:

• Gnairly – Helped with Entry Analysis and Comment Analysis.
• Taryn – Wrote the majority of the KYM history.
• 3kole5 – Helped with the KYM Forum Analysis and generally.

And some minor contributors:

• Asdfghjkl, Justnoway, Patriciantrainer, ShiJo, NeonWabbit, Space Cowboy, Spores – Provided logs for IRC stats.
• Oryaw – Special thanks for help with something that didn't get released here, but got some behind-the-scenes attention.

One last note before I give the table of contents, and then actual information: Much of this was a statistical project. In statistics, things can be a bit complicated and fuzzy. The information in each section will be simplified, and not technical, for the normal person’s reading.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• KYM History
• User Stats
• Origins of Entries
• Entry Analysis
• Forum Analysis
• Image Analysis
• Comment Analysis
• KYM Community Activity
• Closing

KYM HISTORY

Know Your Meme began in 2007 by Andrew Baron (the creator of RocketBoom) and Kenyatta Cheese (Yatta), mainly for the purpose of informative videos. Some time in 2008, they relaunched the site with developer Jamie Wilkinson (Jamie Dubs). Jamie, Yatta, and Elspeth Jane (elspethjane) continued work on the videos, which garnered traction quickly. Siteside, Chris Menning and Greg Leuch (gleuch) were hired on for writing and system operations, respectively. Brad Kim, the current editor of the site, was also hired around this time. Don Caldwell and James, both current administrators of the site, were both hired some time in 2010.

Several temporary employees have come and gone between 2007 and now. Jamie, Yatta, Chris, and ElspethJane all left after KYM was purchased from RocketBoom by CheezBurger in 2011. Mike (the current producer of PBS Idea Channel) and Patrick were hired on as actors for the video series in 2011 and left in the same year.

In February 2016, Cheezburger was obtained by an unnamed buyer, later revealed to be Israeli media company Literally Media. Afterwards the staff team would be expanded by two people with the hiring of Matt Schimkowitz, and Briana Milman.

USER STATS

Each user is assigned a number to their account. For example, knowyourmeme.com/users/237888 leads to my account. Because of this, we can analyze the activity of KYM users.

"Lurker" is someone who activated their account, wasn't spam, but also never contributed anything. Inactive contributor is someone who once contributed a decent amount of things, but then left. Inactive would be something like one or two comments, and then never returned.

ORIGIN OF ENTRIES

Certain moderators have access to information about the origin of entries and site activity. However, this information is not supposed to be shared publicly. Because of this, studies such as Where Do the Memes Come From? by Jack the Dipper are indispensable (and surprisingly accurate, wink wink). For full information, visit the linked thread. Below is a short summary of the findings.

By a noticeable amount, the two most common origins for confirmed entries on KYM are YouTube and 4chan. Collectively, they account for 1/4th of all the confirmed entries on KYM, at the time of the study.

The next two most common origins are from Reddit and Tumblr.

ENTRY ANALYSIS

Given the method of analyzing this was discovered in the process of working on this, we kept it simple and randomly selected only 100 entries. (The mathy part of this suggests something like, most of the time, the numbers presented below are within 10% of the real deal.)

About 30% of all entries are removed, and roughly another 30% are deadpooled. This leaves a bit less than half of all entries submitted to the site in the "good standing" zone.

However, half of all entries that weren't removed should have been deadpooled and were simply missed. This means only about 1/3rd of all entries submitted to the site were of actual value.

A normal non-removed entry on KYM had 2-3 editors. Given that this is probably skewed due to the fact that deadpooling an entry makes the deadpooling moderator an editor, only submissions and confirmed entries are probably more reflective of the standard editing team. There are normally about 3 editors on a real bona fide entry.

Spreadsheet

FORUM ANALYSIS

For the forums, we analyzed 100 threads.

Nearly half (42) of the threads were unavailable. The average thread has 600 views, with 17 posts from 11 users. Threads tend towards having a small amount of posts and views relative to the average – if charted out, it'd look more like this

than this.

In addition, there was basically no correlation between the number of posts or users in a thread and the number of views. This suggests that the attractiveness of a thread hardly has anything to do with getting people to post in it – those are two nearly completely unconnected factors.

Spreadsheet

IMAGE ANALYSIS

It's back, and this time, it's 500 images.

About 10% of all images are removed. The rest of these statistics will focus on the 90% that weren't.

About 1/4th of the images were fanart. About 18% were an image macro, and another 12% were animated.

About 40% of all images were untagged. Only about 1 out of 4 had any sourcing, and over half the time it was inadequate. (Note that this study was done pre-sourcing field. I would suspect sourcing has gotten a bit better due to the passive encouragement of having an explicit source field.) Over half of all images had no title, instead having the automatically assigned title before mandatory titles were implemented. Lastly, about 1 out of every 5 images have been edited at least once.

Spreadsheet

COMMENT ANALYSIS

Lastly, studying 2000 comments, nearly completely done by Jack the Dipper alone, the comment analysis. This is by far the most rigorous and thorough analysis of any part of the site I've ever seen, and it's thanks to him. There is a lot of data here that I just couldn't make into a forum post, but if you're interested feel free to check out the spreadsheet linked at the end and skim through it yourself. I've left in some spreadsheet magic to help people understand it, if you have the patience.

The average comment got about a +4 net score, and most didn't get a single downvote. To get buried is extremely rare – less than 1% of comments were buried. Most comments (68%) were made on images, with the majority of the rest (20%) made on entries.

32% of comments were a reply to another comment, and 26% were replied to; just over half of all comments had neither. Only about 7% of all comments didn't include text, and 12% of comments had image embeds.

Lastly, only about one third of one percent of all comments were flagged NSFW, and about 16% were deleted.

Spreadsheet

KYM COMMUNITY ACTIVITY

This is one of the most important things I discovered while doing this, and also one of the most depressing, so I've left it for last. I'll let the images speak for themselves.

Image uploads have been falling since 2012, and comments since 2014. That's 5 and 3 years, respectively. We hardly had over a third of the comments in August as we did in August 2014 (the most active month for commenting on KYM), and we have just a bit over 40% of the images uploaded in July as we did in July 2012 (the most active month for image uploads on KYM). Very simply put, KYM's community is dying, and it has for years.

What's curious is that KYM's Alexa rank has not fallen. While I only have access to Alexa ranking that just goes a year back, it's clear its been rising while the community activity is seriously falling. This suggests that KYM doesn't need its community to function as a website.

As a small side note, videos consistently proved very weird through all probing I did. Here's the activity chart for that.

KYM Comments Per Month
KYM Images Per Month
KYM Videos Per Month

CLOSING

Thank you for checking this out. We've put a lot of work into this, so I hope you all liked it. Unfortunately, several things that we had worked on got cut in the end. Here are some fragments from those, if you're interested:

• KYM Top Images Analysis – Spreadsheet
• IRC Stats – Pastebin
• Admin Timeline – Image

If you have any questions or comments, please leave them in this thread.

What happened in January 2016 where the number of videos skyrocketed?

Beats me. Low-activity things like wall posts, DMs, video uploads, etc tend to have really weird, random spikes with little to no predictability. Maybe spammers targeted the video galleries, maybe people just felt more like uploading that month.

Wow, great analysis, very interesting! So, any theories as to why the community is dying?

> less than 1% of comments were buried

Really makes you feel special.

Well it started in 2012-2014 or so, that's when the peak goes into a fall, so that discards all my initial theories. 2014 seems like a better starting point, comments are a better indicator, what could've happened then?

fantastic analysis
but the fact that spambots are the most active users is sad and funny at the same time

Fantastic job, Rivers! It was an honor and a pleasure to work with you on this.

>less than 2% of total users are currently active
Wow.

memčiki memosiki said:

So, any theories as to why the community is dying?

My guess is a combination of the site getting more political, which probably has driven away users not interested in it (while comments aren't as affected thanks to the arguing/debating that happens) and most large fandoms (MLP, SU, Undertail, etc.) settling down from their peaks in 2014 and 2015, thus generating substantially less comments and images.

Wow, great analysis, very interesting! So, any theories as to why the community is dying?

Thanks!

I have one theory, although it's a little spicy. Firstly, review the image uploads chart.

It hits its peak in 2012, but it regains a bit until the same time comment activity falls. It was pointed out to me by another mod that 2012ish was the height of the pony craze, which really influenced KYM. MLP images are still some of the most common ones, because so many were uploaded. So, it seems reasonable to assume that a decline in community didn't really start until 2014. In fact, here's a graph comparing image uploads to comment posts from the peak of the comment posting to now.

This is a really good correlation for stuff like this, and it's monumentally more correlated than from the beginning of the site to now – suggesting that post-August 2014, the community really has been declining in activity as a whole.

This is where things get a bit spicy, so please read until the end – otherwise it's likely you would get the wrong idea of what I'm saying.

What happened directly after August 2014? Was there anything very significant to this community that happened in September 2014?

GamerGate was eternally trending. It gathered insane amounts of comments, and practically ruled the site for a year. It took unusual action to get GamerGate to stop trending, and even then it was met with great controversy. GamerGate still lives on today on KYM, with the GamerGate Thread still going strong.

In other words, it absolutely was the hottest and most community-influencing thing of September 2014, and the following months.

From my perspective, it had a huge influence on KYM's culture – this is much more anecdotal, but when I review old comments sections, even for fairly political and controversial entries, they seem to take on a much more moderate, calm tone. Today, they seem to fit more of the general GamerGater.

Remember the GamerGater survey? I do. Some of the most commonly mentioned favorite subreddits for them were things like r/SocialJusticeInAction and r/MensRights. Despite the obvious leanings in the choices of places to hang out, and their reviling of "SJWs", and their infatuation with it (most described GG as having at least in part to do with fighting SJWism, and over half had spent more than 100 hours of their life with GamerGate), many identified as liberal, progressive, or a social democrat – remind you of KYM's community at all? It does for me. Indeed, the GamerGate described her seems like a proto-version of KYM's current community.

A plurality of GamerGate supporters identify as libertarians (19%), followed by liberal (17%), moderate (13%)… A majority of GamerGate supporters state their views are generally centre-left (53%), followed by centre-right (13%), centre (12%), far-left (11%), apolitical (7%)…

The vast majority (73%) of GamerGate supporters support the legality of abortion… The vast majority (83%) of GamerGate supporters support same-sex marriage… The vast majority (71%) of GamerGate supporter support respecting the choices of trans people…

The vast majority (95%) of GamerGate support equal rights for all humans. With that being said there is a plurality-tie (46%) between those who believe modern feminism is doing serious harm to society or that feminism does more harm than good.

Lots of numbers, but the gist of it is this – they heavily identify as at least socially liberal while having a streak of anti-feminism, anti-SJWism, and men's rights advocacy.

So, it seems to me that KYM's community was formed by this, and that this had turned off many members, leading to reduced activity on the site in the long run. Not surprising – GamerGate was disliked enough that it got kicked out of many communities, and still gets bad press. Given it found such a foothold on KYM, it makes sense that might lead to a dislike of the community.

This is just my hypothesis, though, and relies a lot on anecdotal evidence. I don't know of a better idea, but if anyone has one feel free to suggest it.

The pony craze was insane enough to a point we had one user who single-handedly uploaded 10%(!!!) of all images we had on the site at the time.

Additionally, after ponies also began the time where we started covering more fandoms in subculture entries.

If possible, can we get those monthly uploaded/commented graphs but this round with those two monsters excluded from the batch? It's save to call them outliers to an extend.

Yo hats off to everyone involved in collecting all this data and writing it all out. Must've been a lengthy process.

One thing I noticed about the section regarding comments was the percentage of replies and comments that didn't have replies. KYM didn't always have a reply system and before it was implemented, users would always start off their comments with "@[username]" (ex: @Rivers) if it was meant as a reply. Were these type of comments taken into account?

That'd be cool, but a lot of work. Waaaay too much. The way we gathered this info was by comparing the automatically assigned numbers of the first and last images uploaded each month, by jumping through them in trial and error to find them. To do that would require either going through every image, or doing a bit of statistical analysis on every single month.

I don't think I'll do it, but yearly or bi-yearly image uploads minus pony posts would be more feasible. Alongside just adding together all the already gathered data, a bunch of images in the time frame would have to be randomly selected and just have it noted how many are MLP. If done yearly, it'd require something like 500-1000 images in total be checked out. Pretty possible, if anyone's up to the task, I'd be fine with just setting it up and telling you what to do.

@Eris

They weren't, it only measured the reply system KYM had. I forgot that there was once a time where KYM didn't have this feature. Do you know when this was implemented, roughly? From that a guess could be made how many comments would be affected by this, to see how biased it might have ended up being.

@Rivers

Back when I joined and started contributing to the site (31 Dec 2012), the reply feature didn't exist yet. Using the old photos in my gallery that have comments on them, I figured out that the feature was implemented sometime between May 25, 2013 and July 17, 2013.

Hope this helps!

Out of all comments ever submitted, about 1/8 had been submitted by then; out of all comments that weren't deleted, something like 1/4 had been submitted by then.

This obviously wouldn't affect the ~13% that were recorded having a reply and being a reply; meaning 87% were a bit more likely (I'd guess probably something like 20% higher chance, just guesstimation) sooo maybe it's something like 60-70% were a response, or were responded to, or both.

Anyone interested in KYM IRC stats from 2012 – 2016 can check out the related pages on my website:

First few renders of the stats / Download link for all the logs:
http://stats.neonwabbit.com/Archived/

Final render of the stats page:
http://stats.neonwabbit.com/Archived/FuckOffTheresNoSecretStatsHere/

I don't really have anything to contribute but I would like to say that this is extremely impressive.

I have a thing for statistics. They're interesting to me.
Nice work here.

Even though I dislike statistics, as long as it's talking about something I enjoy (in this case this site) then I'm all over what it has to say.

Wow. I didn't realize how many images were lacking in sources, tags, etc. I've been chipping away slowly, so hopefully the next time this survey comes out we can get higher results.