What's the best time window to post a topic for discussion on iTalki community discussion board? I mean, most of the time I login (around my local time zone of -4 EDT/ GMT with DST at or about 8 to 10

LinguoMaster

What's the best time window to post a topic for discussion on iTalki community discussion board?

I mean, most of the time I login (around my local time zone of -4 EDT/ GMT with DST at or about 8 to 10 PM) the discussion board is flooded with Language partner requests and such. And most of the interesting discussion threads are lost in that chaos. Therefore I choose to not post during that time window. So, I'm looking for any better time slot or day (in a given week) that can get the maximum attention from the active community members (assuming that the distribution of suck folks are normal throughout any 24 hr time slot/ period) for effective discussion rather than getting pushed to the bottom within few minutes after posting.

Also, shouldn't iTalki developers isolate discussions threads from partner requests/ student-teacher advertising?

(or at least provide a filtering mechanism to distinguish them.)

(or give some ranking metric to sort the discussion according to it's interest/ view weight-age rather than the time posted.)

I'm sure this thread is also going to get embedded/ pushed to the bottom of the discussion panel within an hour or so LOL!

Oct 8, 2019 7:28 AM

Comments · 5

There is no good time to avoid the problems you mention. However I have e done a little experimenting and posting between 00:00 and 02:00 hours London Time results in zero views always. You cannot take the number of comments as a measure because that only means that of all the viewers only a few were interested or not shy to engage.

00:00 TO 02:00 London = 00:00 to 02:00 or 03:OO Europe

00:00 TO 02:00 London = 00:00 to 07:00 or 08:OO Asia

00:00 TO 02:00 London = 00:00 to 20:00 or 30:OO America

00:00 TO 02:00 London = 00:00 to 14:00 or 15:OO Australia

Very rough estimations

October 8, 2019

@Aud

Not necessarily, some threads can get lost based on the posting time and user traffic of engagement group.

That's why a ranking metric is required to sort this problem.

Also, you are partially right about the Topic and question's quality (which again is a part of multiple parameters involved in ranking classification.)

Chain reaction to discussion takes place only if the thread survives some preliminary phases of engagement time window. If a good quality thread remains unnoticed or inactive for a while due to multiple flooding of partner request topics - the chain can be easily broken.

And Thank you for your input!

I'll make some suggestions & request to the support team. (Thanks for the heads up!)

October 8, 2019

You may offer a support team to separate Discussion section from language practice requests and create a separate section for them.

I offered some improvement for Notebook section. They said 'Thank you, we will take it into consideration' :))

October 8, 2019

I think, it depends more on a topic and style it has been written in, rather than on time. If the topic temps people to comment, it will be on top no matter what is the time over the globe, because users from different time zones make kind of a chain reaction on it, commenting it when they are awake and free for talking.

October 8, 2019

@John

There's a Normalization metric that compares the engagement quality based on machine learning techniques and some statistical analysis.

For example, a good thread is classified based on:

category tags (i.e., what most users are likely to engage)

views vs comments ratio

audience rank (i.e., each user should be pre-awarded a rank based on previous up voting history on that subject tag like in StackExchange community)

question posters rank

Average engagement duration per login session per user per discussion

Aggregated positive upvotes against negative ones

And various other quantization and parameters to fine tune the thread value.

All these require a significant amount of historical data and active user metric collection for comparative analysis against a standardization model.

Such classification scripts won't even take any significant compute resource on their web hosting server.

But such rigorous implementation requires some effort from the developer side.

(I don't think iTalki will be serious enough to implement such mathematical models for sorting their discussion boards like Facebook Discussion forums, StackExchange community, Twitter comment ranking, etc., - all machine learning embedded.)

And Yeah, I know time zone conversions!

Moreover, it depends on the userbase nationality concentration. (Which is think is mostly Asians, since iTalki is originally a Chinese initiative and followed by Latin Americans - projected from Spanish to English learners.)

Also, continent wide time window estimates are kind of a overkill.

Especially, for America the zone mapping can vary from -3 EDT (Atlantic Maritime) to -9 PST (Alaska)

So, 00:00 to 02:00 London can vary from,

21:00 to 23:00 EDT

15:00 to 17:00 PST

(For Overall America alone!)

October 8, 2019

LinguoMaster

Language Skills

English, French, Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil

Learning Language

English, French