<< the signal/noise ratio I prefer is 5:1. It's currently about 1:4. >>
Let's see...
Four years ago, at its peak, SI was getting over 20,000 posts per day. Assuming that was utopia for a financial chat board such as SI and applying your preferred signal-to-noise ratio of 5:1 to this figure, approximately 16,700 posts would have been "signal" and 3,300 "noise".
Today, SI gets about 3,800 posts per day. If your current ratio of 1:4 is correct, it means there are 760 "signal" posts per day to go along with 3,040 "noise" posts.
This implies that the noise posts have remained relatively stable (or even might have gone down a little), while the signal posts have tanked dramatically. Obviously, this trend correlates with stock market activity, as many here have suggested.
Improving SI's Alexa traffic rank -- which you'll need to do to increase ad revenue -- requires any plan to shift the current ratio (from 1:4 to 5:1) to focus on growth of investment posts rather than curtailing of non-investment discussion. If this is what you were driving at, I agree whole-heartedly. |
