In July 2012, more than 600 different users posted a comment; since March 2012, about 1600 different users; since October 2011 — 2300; since May 2011 — 2900; since December 2010 — 3400; since May 2010 — 3900; since August 2009 — 4400.
Since the beginning, including the comments imported from Overcoming Bias, with some duplicates (people sometimes re-registered with different usernames when moving to LW, and the same username on Overcoming Bias was imported as multiple different usernames on LW if it corresponded to different emails), comments were posted under about 7500 different usernames.
Of the 4400 users who commented since August 2009, 1390 have written at least 10 comments; 900 users — at least 25 comments; 630 users — at least 50 comments; 429 users — at least 100 comments; 225 users — at least 250 comments; 134 users — at least 500 comments; 57 users — at least 1000 comments; 13 users — at least 2500 comments.
One flaw: You’re not locating anywhere near all of the people that registered using this method because I bet a lot of people have never commented. In one website’s database that I’ve got access to, almost 70% of the users register without ever doing the expected main activity. Unless you spider your copy of all the comments to cache home pages, follow the links off of friends lists and include other links to home pages around the internet (like Google does, which is why I chose Google instead of wget), you’re probably missing a huge proportion of the profiles. You may argue that counting active users is more relevant than counting total members, but these guys might be voting on our posts and comments, and if they outnumber us, they’ve got more influence over the content than we do.
In July 2012, more than 600 different users posted a comment;
since March 2012, about 1600 different users;
since October 2011 — 2300;
since May 2011 — 2900;
since December 2010 — 3400;
since May 2010 — 3900;
since August 2009 — 4400.
Since the beginning, including the comments imported from Overcoming Bias, with some duplicates (people sometimes re-registered with different usernames when moving to LW, and the same username on Overcoming Bias was imported as multiple different usernames on LW if it corresponded to different emails), comments were posted under about 7500 different usernames.
Of the 4400 users who commented since August 2009, 1390 have written at least 10 comments;
900 users — at least 25 comments;
630 users — at least 50 comments;
429 users — at least 100 comments;
225 users — at least 250 comments;
134 users — at least 500 comments;
57 users — at least 1000 comments;
13 users — at least 2500 comments.
Wedrifid has written more than 10000 comments.
(Based on a wget’ed dump of all LW comments.)
One flaw: You’re not locating anywhere near all of the people that registered using this method because I bet a lot of people have never commented. In one website’s database that I’ve got access to, almost 70% of the users register without ever doing the expected main activity. Unless you spider your copy of all the comments to cache home pages, follow the links off of friends lists and include other links to home pages around the internet (like Google does, which is why I chose Google instead of wget), you’re probably missing a huge proportion of the profiles. You may argue that counting active users is more relevant than counting total members, but these guys might be voting on our posts and comments, and if they outnumber us, they’ve got more influence over the content than we do.
In the English Wikipedia the number of registered account dwarfs the number of accounts actually in use by a couple of orders of magnitude.