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Comment by djohnston | Hacker News Reader

Few things I despise more than an absolute number provided with no context. Is 60K a lot? A little? The usual? How much does it deviate from the norm?

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Agreed. "For one week, an average of 60K per day left the platform." So... 420K that week (feels appropriate, lol). That's a bit under 0.1%. With 600M reported users, X can do this every day for 27 years.

But I'm betting this week was an outlier for some reason or another.

Indeed. And on a site with 611 Million monthly active users, that means 0.01% are deactivating their accounts each day. 3% after a year. Sounds insiginificant to me.

611 million active user IDs. There's a lot of bots, and spammers with multiple user IDs.

I'd be interested in seeing something about user IDs that scroll some minimum amount vs user IDs that just post.

How are they counting deactivation's?

My account got nuked because I changed my birthday date for jokes and it locked me out for being 'too young' when I signed up way back in 2007. I would have needed to provide photos of government ID to re-activate so I let it go.

I think you've overlooked something: people can leave a social media site without deactivating their account. I haven't used Digg or Slashdot in at least a decade, for example, but never got rid of my accounts. I've also got a few alt Reddit accounts that I haven't logged into in a long time.

I'd expect in general the number of people who leave a site but don't bother to actually go through the steps of deactivating the account to be quite a bit higher than the number that do deactivate.

I believe that the appropriate response isn't to get upset about it, but to chalk it up to another article meant to mislead in the avalanche that are printed daily. I mean not only is the number meaningless without the context of relative deviation, as you point out, but new signups aren't addressed either. The article is clickbait in total.

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