You gotta love people who believe the statistics too literally...

[jducoeur]

So I just noticed a comment in gyzki's journal, that he was randomly selected for a poll of ages of LJ users. The randomized request claims,

"The official statistics claim that the most common age for LiveJournal users is 5 and two million (out of 10.5 million users) are under the age of 10."

I found that a tad preposterous, but was surprised to find that the raw stats page does say exactly that. (Very interesting page, BTW, with things like the raw numbers for all of the most popular interests.)

Surely this is someone just believing a computer bug, though. If you look at the raw numbers, they claim that there are nearly a million users each at ages 5 and 6 -- and a far-more-believable 800 at age 7. The numbers for ages 5 and 6 must be some kind of glitch; I'd guess that they are buckets that are used for people who don't actually give their ages, but that's just a guess. If you look at the official stats page instead, it shows the main peak at a more likely 18 years old.

I'm really pretty bemused by the whole tempest in a teapot about the average age of the LJ user. Yes, I do suspect that the stats are off, and read a bit too low, because the older crowd are less likely to accurately state their age. But it's not a worldshaking crisis...

Comments

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

I don't have the year on my birthday. I suspect that not having the year (a lot don't) would skew the raw data *somehow* but why it (maybe) defaults to age six is beyond me.

[cellio]

I didn't list a year when I created my journal, because I wanted my birthday to be available (e.g. on the portal page) to my friends, but I didn't want to publish my birth date to the whole internet alongside my real name. Many older users do this, so we're uncounted in these stats (or incorrectly counted, maybe?).

Just in the last few days LJ fixed this; you can now enter your birth date but control what subset of it is published.

[jducoeur]

See gyzki's theory below. His guess (which sounds extremely plausible) is that if you don't put your birth year in, it interprets that as "0", and translates it as 2000. Which means that anyone who doesn't put their birth year comes through as either 5 or 6 at the moment, depending on their birthday...