Popular Communities (implementing something similar to Livejournal's feature?)

[sparklycockles]

Title:
Popular Communities (implementing something similar to Livejournal's feature?)

Area:
Classification

Summary:
Livejournal has a feature called "Popular Communities" that sorts communities based on usage/popularity that I would love to see replicated for Dreamwidth.

Description:
On Livejournal there is a list of communities sorted from the most popular to the least. At the top of the list you can search for what community you're looking for and jump straight to it. There are other more complicated features relating to it (such as the social capital now displayed) but I don't really think they're necessary.

I think this feature, or something similar, could be useful for people searching to add new communities to their friends-lists or for looking up the activity in a community they are considering joining. It's a bit of an "extra" though - the site doesn't really require such a change.

But honestly I just really want to see where my own communities would rank! Mark did something similar to this on his own journal (informally, of course) and my community was #17 (or thereabouts). I'd like to know if it has increased or decreased since that time! (Another informal list would also be interesting!)

Poll #11552 Popular Communities (implementing something similar to Livejournal's feature?)

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 56

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This suggestion:

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Should be implemented as-is.
8 (14.3%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
5 (8.9%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
19 (33.9%)

(I have no opinion)
24 (42.9%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[jjhunter]

I'm not sure about front-end use, but it would be fun to see this in the raw DW stats - maybe as a pop_comms section?

[ladyasul]

"Most popular" is such an interesting thing to try to define... It'd be neat to be able to sort by (and see the stats for) communities ranked by total entry views, total entries, total comments, average # of comments per entry, and main comm views, etc... for all time/last 6 months/last 3 months/last month/last week/last 24 hours.

Not sure if DW even keeps such statistics, but it would be fun to see some of the rankings and comparisons somewhere, yes! :)

[marahmarie]

Voted should not be implemented because the most popular thing on DW are fandoms so the list would look like all DW is is fandom. It makes a questionable impression to outsiders and those wondering whether or not to join DW. I know that before and shortly after I joined DW I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what topics were most popular here and who was who in relation to what (especially community-wise) and what was this and how was that and if I had seen fandom dominating in any sense I may never have joined this site nor stayed. Which is exactly my point: keep highlighting of what goes on here general, not specifically pointing to the dominating non-official communities nor tied to user stats, to help not drive off any potential new users who might look at those stats or links and go: "Ew, this site is all about fandom| RPG | porn | the Easter Bunny" and run the other way.

On a related note, LJ still does this and it's confusing when MintyApple is always on that page because you start thinking it's an "official" (read: LJ-sanctioned, LJ-run) style community, but ASFAIK it's not. To this day that confuses me, though. I just hate the inference between "This is what's most popular here" and "This is *who we are* here", whether that inference is intended or not - I guess my mind reads "we're showing off who's hot" as "we're sanctioning or showing favor to this content", and I find this slippery ground for a site to be on. I don't think it's done much to to help LJ. :(

On another related note (I just keep thinking of more comparisons and so I can't get this done) tumblr recently started a "most popular tags" list in the sidebars of people's blogs and/or on the home page and the other day the top link took me to poetry, which I know is not the most popular thing on tumblr (I would think it's that thing that starts with a "p" in my list above). Which is another thing I don't like: when websites use the most popular tags not based on real stats but based on their own ambitions to get everyone to stop focusing on one use of the site and realize the site has other uses. Sure it does. But if anyone wanted to use it for those uses, they would.