@randulo Another ... interesting ... element is how often I seem to run across the same, fairly small, number of people who do engage in interesting discussions.

I've known a few people across numerous sites since the late 1990s. Arguably the 1980s in a couple of instances.

There's a substantial set I've known from G+ and on through Diaspora* and now Mastodon, yourself included.

There are people such as @ColinTheMathmo who's an HN god and also active on the Fediverse.

There've been additions and subtractions from that set, and I've not done a really structured census / survey of this, though I've pulled at pieces of this. For example, pulling 16 years of Hacker News front page submissions and looking at the stories, sites, submitters, and activity (votes, comments) around those. It'd be interesting to do some sort of Internet Who's Who, with a focus on people who are online but don't make that their livelihood (I'm trying to come up with a rationalisation / justification for excluding, say, marketers, influencers, etc., from the set) and get a sense of what that community is. Going back to Usenet it's seemed that the vital core is probably a few tens or hundreds of thousands of people. And I suspect that's still reasonably true today.

Looking at my HN dataset, the top submitter accounts for about 0.75% of total front-page votes and comments over the whole set. The top 200 submitters account for ~20% of total votes and comments, whilst there are 43,598 submitters in total. Over half (56%) of all front-page submitters have only a single entry.

There are:

• 2 submitters with > 1,000 stories
• 170 w/ >= 100
• 2,812 w/ >= 10
• 19,165 w/ >=2

(That very nearly perfectly follows the rule I'd suggested in a recent HN comment: prevalence and items scale inversely by powers of ten, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36333285 )

Half of all front-page stories are submitted by 2,092 profiles.

These sorts of power-law relations are typical of all media and communications, I'm not trying to paint some picture of a cabal ...

... but I am suggesting that of all online activity, the substantial and substantive part is probably attributable to a much smaller population than most people would think.

(And I suspect that social media companies, or at least some of the larger ones, are in fact aware of this.)

@paul