MyDD on Daily Kos:
The ultimate community blog, with 120,000 registered users and nearly a dozen regular front-page writers. It produces over 500,000 new words of content every day, on virtually every topic in politics, and has attracted writing from virtually the entire Democratic leadership.
Yesterday’s dKos straw poll has me wondering: After 24 hours, why are there only about 25K votes overall? Wouldn’t you expect that number to be higher?
The percentage of registered voters who actually vote in national elections is somewhere around 60-70%. Granted, voting is only one of many activities occuring at dKos, but it still bears asking: why does a community of political activists with a half million visitors and 100K+ registered users not vote in higher numbers in these things? Anyone?
The number of registered users and the number of active users on a site are very different things. I’ve been registered on DailyKos for a couple years, and read it daily, but honestly can’t recall the last time that I logged in, commented, or voted in a poll… so I am registered, but not “active” for the purposes of this discussion. You see such registration / participation divergences on most sites, which suggests that the number registered users isn’t really a good metric of community size.
Thanks for the comment Pete.
Is there a good metric? Otherwise we’re left to assume that 5% of Dkos readers per day are “active” just by measuring who actually vote on the site.
As a political guy, we always say, anecdotally of course because we have no evidence, the bloggers and blog readers don’t do anything but post and occasionally send you $25 bucks. They don’t do the hard work like calls and doors. I’m willing to be a large % of the active members do that work, but if there are only 25,000 nationally, that’s pretty small.
Two things:
1. Results of an Internet poll will have absolutely no effect on a person, whereas a national election will actually have a marginal impact on an individual. I would be curious to see if a straw poll asking dKos visitors if they approved of a proposed change to the site (i.e. a new design or posting policy that would affect usage) would have a higher turnout– I’d bet that it would.
2. The 25k “turnout” is inflated since unregistered users (such as myself) are allowed to vote.
Ian– thanks for the ideas, I’ll look through the archives to see if that’s ever happened.