we decided, immediately after posting that, to reassess how we calculate conversion rate to be based on Active Users (which are actually using the site) instead of Activated Users (which are allowed to post). these numbers were previously about 1:1, but since it's been over a month since launch we're seeing more disparity there. we haven't figured out the correlation between "how many users are in the activation batch" and "how many users actually start posting" but we're gonna get there.
anyway 500 more of you can post now. welcome to cohost
huge week with a ton of small fixes and improvements. extremely exciting stuff.
first, on activations: we’re floating around the cap again so, while we’re still doing daily activation batches, they’re smaller than they were previously. we’ve got some work in progress that will (hopefully) give us another boost in cohost Plus! subscriptions so we can start activating more users again.
more exciting news: starting in september, @jessfromonline will be joining the team part-time for the next few months! she’ll be focusing on bug fixes (she’s got a few in this week’s patch notes already!) so that colin and jae can focus entirely on Features and other big chunks of work. we’re thrilled to have the extra set of hands moving forward.
now, patch notes!
changed where the post composer takes you after saving a post:
draft? takes you to the drafts page
everything else? takes you where you just were
added a preview of where a manual “read more” will sit in the post composer
changed the post editor and profile editor to warn you if you’re trying to leave without saving
changed the behavior of the dashboard to only refresh when you ask for new posts, instead of refreshing continuously
also fixed a bug that would alert you of Ghost Posts
added a setting to hide the number of unread notifications in the sidebar
you’ll just get a blank egg! further freedom from the tyranny of Numbers
also: this is jess’s first change to the site! wow!
changed the order of our <head> tags to hopefully prevent the Flash of Unstyled Content common referred to as “purple cohost”
In this paper we present irrefutable proof of the presence of
Americans on the Cohost1 website.
By analyzing the activity levels
of website users and correlating them with statistical data
about people’s sleep patterns,
we can, with high statistical likelihood,
estimate the locations of these people on the Earth2.
Our methodology consists of measuring
the hourly notification frequency
on a sample Cohost user account,
with the assumption that this data will represent
a reasonable estimate of the activity on the entire website.
By repeatedly querying the
/api/v1/notifications/list
API endpoint on cohost.org,
we were able to obtain over one month of Cohost
notification data (N = 2058).
In this data, we could not see anything.
However, using computer technology3,
we were able to sort the data into 24 buckets
representing the hour of the day in the UTC time zone.
From this, it was possible to create a histogram of the data (Fig. 1).
a histogram showing notification frequency
by UTC hour, from 0 to 23.
Fig. 1: Notification frequency by UTC hour.
The data has a single maximum value at 21:00 UTC,
and a single minimum value at 10:00 UTC.
We can thus estimate that the Cohost website
is most active and least active at around those hours.
A 2016 study4 revealed that people
go to sleep at around 23:00 and wake at around 7:00
in their local time zone.
Using the arithmetic mean5 between the two values
in the finite additive group ℤ/24ℤ,
we were able to calculate that it is very likely
for people to be asleep at 3:00,
and very likely for people to be awake at 15:00.
Hence,
let amax,utc = 21 be the max. activity hour in UTC
let amin,utc = 10 be the min. activity hour in UTC
let hawake = 15 be the mean awake hour in any local time zone
let hasleep = 3 be the mean asleep hour in any local time zone
We can now formulate an optimization problem
to find a UTC offset k to minimize the metric
|amax,k − hawake| +
|amin,k − hasleep|,
where
∀i ∈ {min, max}ai,k =
ai,utc + k.
This problem is trivially solvable:
k equals the integral from
negative to positive infinity
of e to the power of
minus 4 pi t squared over
h awake plus h asleep squared
d t
minus one half
the L1 norm of
the two-dimensional vector
a max utc, a min utc.
this is equivalent to:
k = -6.5
k =
∫∞−∞
e−
4πt2(hawake +
hasleep)2dt
−
12amax,utcamin,utc1
⇔
k = −6.5
(1)
The average UTC offset of a Cohost user is hence −6.5.
Consulting a map reveals that
this UTC offset coincides with the location of North America (Fig. 2).
Fig. 2: The average location of a Cohost user.
Hence, the average Cohost user resides with high likelihood
in North America,
providing irrefutable proof that there are Americans
on Cohost (p ≪ 0.001).
Discussion
It is unclear what this means.
C. Bayer, J. Kaplan, A. Grealish, Cohost dot org,
in: the interweb(s) (2022).
Disputed author, Earth, in: Nature (−4.54×109)
L. Menabrea, A. Lovelace, Sketch of The Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage (1842).
O. Walch, A. Cochran, D. Forger,
A global quantification of “normal” sleep schedules using smartphone data,
in: Science Advances, Vol. 2, Issue 5 (2016).
doi:
10.1126/sciadv.1501705
