Active users isn’t perfect either, for two reasons:
Bot accounts can be actively doing things – in fact, it’s likely that they will do so at some point to build legitimacy. We had someone farming regularly-created bot accounts back on /r/europe around the time I left, reposting slightly-mangled old comments and slightly cropped and rotated old highly-upvoted old images. Dozens of accounts a day.
Some (human) users are just going to lurk, and won’t become active users.
It may be an input into a better estimate, and may be better than total users at this point, but it isn’t the “right” number either, and I would wager that it will start to increasingly deviate from the legitimate number if people start activating bots.
Active users isn’t perfect either, for two reasons:
Bot accounts can be actively doing things – in fact, it’s likely that they will do so at some point to build legitimacy. We had someone farming regularly-created bot accounts back on /r/europe around the time I left, reposting slightly-mangled old comments and slightly cropped and rotated old highly-upvoted old images. Dozens of accounts a day.
Some (human) users are just going to lurk, and won’t become active users.
It may be an input into a better estimate, and may be better than total users at this point, but it isn’t the “right” number either, and I would wager that it will start to increasingly deviate from the legitimate number if people start activating bots.