“‘HP: Methods of Rationality’ Review Statistics”, 2012-11-03 (; backlinks):
Recording fan speculation for retrospectives; statistically modeling reviews for ongoing story with R
The unprecedented gap in Methods of Rationality updates prompts musing about whether readership is increasing enough & what statistics one would use; I write code to download FF.net reviews, clean it, parse it, load into R, summarize the data & depict it graphically, run linear regression on a subset & all reviews, note the poor fit, develop a quadratic fit instead, and use it to predict future review quantities.
Then, I run a similar analysis on a competing fanfiction to find out when they will have equal total review-counts. A try at logarithmic fits fails; fitting a linear model to the previous 100 days of MoR and the competitor works much better, and they predict a convergence in <5 years.
A survival analysis finds no major anomalies in reviewer lifetimes, but an apparent increase in mortality for reviewers who started reviewing with later chapters, consistent with (but far from proving) the original theory that the later chapters’ delays are having negative effects.