Data is hiding secrets everywhere
Data is boring. I think most people agree.
But it's actually data that's behind some of the solutions I'm most proud of from my career. Not data in the traditional sense with dashboards and analysis, but a more creative use of it. The weird, almost coincidental correlations that nobody expected to mean anything.
About 15 years ago I was part of building online communities, one of which at some point had close to a million monthly active users. And by active I mean participants, not just readers (or lurkers, as we called them). It was a competitive environment, and the tone could get sharp. The bigger it got, the more content got reported.
The natural move would have been to hire more moderators. We didn't.
We kept the same number of staff from 200k to a million users. The number of reports grew significantly, but we managed it because we started working preventively instead of reactively.
We went back into the data from when we had 200k users and went through every report. What characterized the content that ended up becoming problematic? Correlations showed up everywhere. Posts with titles written in all caps got reported more often. Same with titles that ended with a period. And posts where the author signed off at the bottom. None of these were decisive on their own, but we ended up with hundreds of signals like that. Posting history, formatting, word choices, time of day. Put into a system, we could spot threads that were heading somewhere before they got there.
Instead of moderators working through a random pile of reports, they had a prioritized queue. They reached the problems early, often before anyone had even reported anything. Things got resolved while they were still manageable.
I saw something similar when I worked on a financial platform where we scored profiles against partner criteria. We were going through the data looking for new signals, and I noticed something odd. People who filled out the form in lowercase earned on average 10% less than those who wrote their name with capitals. We chose not to use it, but it stuck with me. Data hides secrets in everything, even in the way you type your own name.
It doesn't have to be complicated to be useful. It's more about looking properly.