this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
1001 points (98.6% liked)
Fediverse
28707 readers
53 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I've been asking myself the exact same thing.
The top level comment on this thread, to which you complained about graphical syntax, is discussing the MAU decline over the past 30 days.
You talk as if you don’t understand how plots work. If the change looks like a 90% drop, that’s how it’s going to be perceived.
Moreover, if you do start from 0 you instinctively see the 5% drop, and can make the conclusion that it’s big or small yourself. If you don’t do that, you need to calculate numbers. People don’t do that. They see line go down, and get the impression from that.
Any drop would look the same on the initial plot. 5%, drop 50% drop, 0.005% drop. The ’start your y axis at 0’ rule has a lot of exeptions, but this is not one of them. In fact, it’s the quintessential example of lying with a plot.
If you want to see the actual values for each timestep, there are better tools for that. Such as a table.
Explaining all of this feels bizarre. You are de facto trolling by this weird contrarianism.