• Atemu@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    What a terrible graph. That “huge” spike is a mere 0.5% increase. That might as well be noise.

    Don’t believe any graph whose y-axis starts at any value but 0 people.

    • jsdz@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Don’t believe any graph whose y-axis starts at any value but 0 people.

      This one is pretty bad but that is definitely not the right lesson to take from it. The one thing it does show us is that approximately 20k extra new users suddenly showed up compared to the trend, and that would be much more difficult to see if the relevant axis did start at zero. The bigger problem is that it shows too short a time span. It’s not clear how unusual this event was, or if it happens every week.

      The other weird thing is that bottom-right axis does start at zero for some reason. I’m guessing it might somehow be trying to indicate “toots” specifically made by those new users? But that’s not how it’s labelled and it seems unlikely they could have that data.

      • Calavera@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        If you talk about a new wave of users, then the number of users is also important, really important

    • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.gg
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      1 year ago

      This is a bad take in this case. This graph is of total population, not if signups. It effectively is zeroed.

      Sure it’s a very small increase relative to the total but relative to recent history this is very significant.

      Edit: the bigger issue from a data interpretation perspective is the date range sampled is small.