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this post was submitted on 29 Feb 2024
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Well, there's definitely no social network with "orders of magnitude more"... Even if that's only 2 orders of magnitude, that's almost the entire population of the world.
So this made me curious and best I can find there seem to be only a few social media platforms that even have 1 order of magnitude more:
Facebook, with 2.1 billion DAU as of Q4 2023
Youtube, which has 2.7 billion monthly active users (I'm speculating that it has at least 730 million DAU based on that number)
WhatsApp (which wikipedia notes has 2 billion MAU and had 1 billion DAU when it had 1.3 billion MAU, so presumably it's around 1.5 billion DAU now)
DAU is a pretty rare statistic to find reported on, so it's hard to say if there are others.
By your numbers (let order of magnitude == oom):
Reddit: 73M
Reddit + 1 oom: 730M
Reddit + 2 oom: 7.3B
Facebook: 2.1B
So 73M to 7.3B is 2 oom greater, and 7.3B is the same oom as 2.1B, thus there is at least one social network orders of magnitude greater than reddit.
Have I got anything wrong here?
Okay so I'm just going to open myself up to ridicule here; my understanding of comparing numbers using orders of magnitude might be wrong, and if it is, I would like to know that. So on that note, I don't think that's how OOM comparisons work, and I'd be very interested to be corrected if I'm wrong.
You could accurately say that 2.1B has 2 more orders of magnitude than 73M does (7 vs. 9), but I believe when you're directly comparing two numbers and saying that one is "x orders of magnitude larger than y", that doesn't work. You wouldn't say that 10 is an order of magnitude larger than 9... that would be very misleading; 90 is an order of magnitude larger than 9. In fact, that claim would be off by... approximately an order of magnitude.
1 order of magnitude larger than 73M is 730M; 2 orders of magnitude larger is 7.3B, as you note, but... wouldn't you look upward to say a number is in the same order of magnitude, not lower? So since 2.1B is approximately 29x larger than 73M, it would be 1 OOM larger (and only becomes 2 OOM larger at 100x)?
To look at it another way:
73M x 10^1 is a lot closer to the correct value than 73M x 10^2, so even if the correct method is to round to the nearest OOM, it wouldn't beecome 2 OOM larger until 73M x 50, or 3.650B.
Again, it's quite possible that my understanding is incorrect because... this doesn't come up in every day conversation much, so if I'm wrong, please correct me!
In the context odds are that Ace is using "orders of magnitude more" simply to convey "multiple times more", or "a fuckload more"
That said I always understood orders of magnitude as log rounded to the units:
If you're rounding it to a single digit you'd get 1, or one order of magnitude. It isn't too far from being rounded to 2, if Reddit shrinks back to 66M.