Just ran some numbers to find out the average age of people who post on YWS. I arrived at the numbers by taking the average birth year of all posters during each month. Unsurprisingly, it's been holding steady at 17-18 ever since YWS was founded. So if you're a senior in high-school, congrats! You're the average YWSer.
One surprise: for some reason, the average age jumped in 2006, briefly fell back down by the latter end of that year before jumping to 22 in February 2007 (after which it immediately settled back down to 17-18). I think I can explain 2006 as a year where YWS had a lot of difficulty attracting new members, but February 2007 is just odd.
In any case, what's the average birthday of a YWSer right now? November 13th, 1992. By the way, November 13th, 1992 fell on a Friday...
Update on April 29, 2010
Just ran these numbers again, and the average YWS date of birth is now in January 1993, which means the average YWSer is still between 17 and 18. By the way, this number only takes into account people who have logged in during the past 30 days. If I were to include all YWSers in computing the average age, it'd be somewhere in the low 20s.
Surprisingly (to me at least), there was no statistical difference between those who merely logged in and those who posted.
Also, there was no statistical difference when I weighted activity by age. That is, what I did was weight age according to the posting activity of that person. For example, say there were only two YWSers. One was born in 1985. The other was born in 1995. The former has made only one post, and the latter has made 1,000 posts. The unweighted average birth year is 1990. But that's ridiculous; the person who was born in 1985 was barely active. Thus, the weighted average birth year was 1994.99.
Yet, even weighted, there was no statistical difference. It came out to be March 1993, but that's statistically no different than January 1993.
So what does this say? It means activity is like a bell curve across all age groups. The 16 to 20 year olds tend to be the most active, with 13-15 year olds being the second most active group (but much less than 16-20). The 20+ group is barely active though.
*climbs into hole*
