Add survey results

content/blog/survey-02/index.md

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+title = "Newsletter Survey Results"
+date = 2024-06-03
+transparent = true
+draft = false
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+
+Since we are [rebooting the newsletter](https://gamedev.rs/blog/newsletter-changes/), we wanted to know more about our readers. 
+52 of you filled out the survey last month. Thank you very much!
+
+We will now go through the results in the same order as the questions were asked. The full analysis and data is open-sourced on [GitHub](https://github.com/janhohenheim/rust-gamedev-statistics/tree/main/jan-hohenheim-2024).
+
+## Excitement
+
+![Excitement barplot](excitement.png)
+
+On average, readers are excited about the newsletter (the p-value for a t-test of mean 3 is 9.9e-5). The mean excitement level is 3.6 out of 5, the median is 4.
+Our 95% confidence interval is [3.32, 3.91] using a standard error of 0.15.
+
+These are fairly nice results. Anecdotally, we got a lot of messages about issues with the newsletter and how to improve it, 
+so we are happy to see that the excitement is still high. Still, the data shows that we have room for improvement.
+
+## Content Quantity
+
+![Content quantity barplot](content_quantity.png)
+
+
+When asked about how to change the amount of content per newsletter, the majority of readers (58%%) voted to leave the amount as-is or don't care. 
+More pessimistically, this means nearly half of the readers would change something about the content quantity. 
+17% voted for "less content; keep only the most important news" and 25% for "more content; add sections for minor news".
+These two options are luckily not mutually exclusive. 
+One option we could implement is to have a new section for "minor news" where we don't go into detail, 
+and a section for "miscellaneous links" where we only list some links without any commentary.
+
+## Newsletter Frequency
+
+![Newsletter frequency barplot](frequency.png)
+
+73% of readers are either happy with the current frequency or don't care. A minority of 21% would like the newsletter to become quarterly. 
+Arguments we've heard for this are that a lower frequency would allow editors to improve the quality that goes into each newsletter. 
+Counterarguments include that a lower frequency would make the newsletter less timely. 
+Things like calls for playtesters or job offers would be less useful if they were only sent out every three months.
+
+## AI
+
+![AI barplot](ai.png)
+
+This question was a catalyst for a lot of discussion on Discord. 
+
+If we interpret the answers as a scale of 1-5, where 1 is "not okay at all" and 5 is "I love it", the mean answer was 2.25, the median 2.
+Notably, the mode is tied at 1 and 2. The 95% confidence interval is [1.89, 2.61] using a standard error of 0.18. 
+People are generally against using an LLM to generate summaries
+(the p-value of a t-test of mean 3 is 1.2e-4).
+
+While a majority of readers (65%) are at least okay with AI-generated summaries, a significant minority (35%) are not okay at all with this proposal. 
+These include very active members of the community and 
+contributors who have announced that they would no longer want their content to be included in the newsletter if AI was used.
+
+Of note is that the verbal feedback we got indicated that a lot of readers did not fully understand what exactly was being proposed. 
+People worried that we would start generating a majority of the newsletter or entire sections with AI, which is not something any of us wants. 
+Some readers also thought we already started using LLMs.
+The actual idea was to use AI to generate summaries of articles that were already hand-picked by the editors but not summarized yet because of time constraints.
+The summaries would then be edited and verified by the editors. The extent to which AI would be used would be limited to up to two sentences per late article.
+Any confusion in this regard is our fault.
+We will try to be more clear on such questions in the future.
+
+Although this misunderstanding might have skewed the results, we have reason to believe that the effect is not too large. 
+Anecdotally, when we properly explained the proposal to readers who were against it, 
+most did not change their mind and cited deontological reasons for their stance. 
+Chief among these was solidarity with the large number of creatives who recently lost their jobs due to AI-generated content, 
+inside and outside the game development industry.
+
+## Tone
+
+![Tone barplot](tone.png)
+
+A significant majority of readers (86.5%) are happy with the current tone of the newsletter, with a minority of 11.5% wanting a less formal tone. 
+While votes for the latter did not reach a majority, the written feedback we got included quite a few requests for more "personality" in the newsletter.
+
+## Contributions
+
+![Contributions barplot](contributions.png)
+
+The majority of readers (61.5%) have not yet contributed to the newsletter and 26.9% contributed 2-5 times. 
+Only 3.8% contributed exactly once, while the rest (7.7%) are heavy contributors, helping us out more than five times.
+
+While it might seem weird that more people contributed 2-5 times than exactly once,
+keep in mind that the former is the sum of people who contributed twice, thrice, four times, and five times. 
+The reason we binned these together is that we are interested in the following categories:
+- Pure readers
+- People who contributed once and then stopped
+- People who contributed a few times
+- People who are regular contributors
+
+We are happy to see that people who contributed once seem to continue contributing in the future.
+
+## Ease
+
+![Ease barplot](ease.png)
+
+The mean ease of contributing is 3.0, and the median is 3. The 95% confidence interval is [2.5, 3.6] using a standard error of 0.26.
+
+Readers generally feel neutral about the ease of contributing to the newsletter (the p-value of a t-test of mean 3 is 0.87).
+
+We can do better here, but we are not sure yet how. 
+We'd love to hear your ideas on [GitHub](https://github.com/rust-gamedev/rust-gamedev.github.io/issues/1519) or on Discord (ping @janhohenheim).
+
+## Keeping up with the newsletter
+
+![Keeping up barplot](informed.png)
+
+This was a multiple-choice question. The most popular source of information about the newsletter is RSS (27.5%). 
+If we add the choices for the official Rust GameDev Discord server (21.7%) and other Discord servers (11.6%), 
+Discord in general becomes the leading source of information (33.3%), taking up nearly exactly a third of all votes.
+
+We can see the shift from X / Twitter to Mastodon reported by many OSS communities in our readers as well. 
+Lemmy is not looking popular as an alternative to Reddit yet, with no reader reporting it as a source of information.
+
+The "Email" option in the survey is meant for people who have set up some kind of email alerts manually.
+
+Per written feedback, a lot of people want to see proper email subscriptions implemented. While this was a goal for this month, 
+we have not managed to implement it yet because of personal things that came up for Jan Hohenheim, who volunteered to implement it.
+We will try to get this done for the next newsletter.
+
+## What is going well
+
+![What is going well wordcloud](like.png)
+
+This was a free-text question. The above is a word cloud of the answers with some obvious words like "game" or "newsletter" removed.
+Note that the inclusion of the word "AI" is misleading, as it was only mentioned in texts like "I like that we don't use AI, please do".
+
+Going through the feedback by hand, common things readers enjoy about the newsletter are:
+- A good mix of content
+- Very open to contributions
+- Small-scale games are featured, not just success stories or technical articles
+
+## What needs to be improved
+
+![What needs to be improved wordcloud](improve.png)
+
+Another free-text question. The feedback here is fairly diverse. The most common complaints we already mentioned in previous sections are:
+- Add an email subscription
+- Improve the ease of contributing
+
+Additionally, many people feel like the "Games" section reads more like an advertisement than an article aimed at other game developers.
+
+Among the more unique suggestions were:
+- Conduct interviews
+- Have a stronger sense of personality in the writing
+- Make the newsletter more consistent in timing and quantity
+- Have more editors to not overburden the current ones
+- Have some more clarity of purpose
+
+
+## Comments
+
+![Comments wordcloud](comment.png)
+
+This last free-text question was meant for any additional comments readers might have. 
+The word cloud above is dominated by one sentence: "Thank you for your work". Thank you very very much for your kind words! 
+We are working on this newsletter in our free time because we love the community and Rust game development, so reading this means a lot to us.
+
+## Correlations
+
+We were interested in how the responses to some questions correlated with how much people had already contributed to the newsletter.
+Long story short: it seems like there is no significant correlation between how much people contributed and how they answered the other questions.
+
+Let's look at the correlations in turn now.
+Note that all the following plots are jittered to make the data more readable.
+
+
+### Excitement By Contributions
+
+![Excitement correlation](excitement_contributions.png)
+
+We hypothesized that people who contributed more to the newsletter would be more excited about it. 
+We found no evidence for this (the p-value of a Jonckheere-Terpstra test for increasing trend is 0.986). 
+Based on the plot above, we then hypothesized that the opposite might be true, namely that frequent contributors are less excited about the newsletter.
+This actually might be the case (p-value is 0.021), but do not take this as a strong result.
+It is a posthoc hypothesis and the resulting p-value is not very low considering the number of tests we run in this analysis. 
+For these reasons, we do not consider this result to be significant.
+
+### Feelings About AI By Contributions
+
+![AI correlation](ai_contributions.png)
+
+We hypothesized that there would be a correlation between how much people contributed to the newsletter and how they felt about AI-generated summaries. 
+We found no evidence for this (the p-value of a Jonckheere-Terpstra test for a two-sided alternative is 0.57).
+
+### Ease of Contributing By Contributions
+
+![Ease correlation](ease_contributions.png)
+
+We hypothesized that there would be a correlation between how much people contributed to the newsletter and how easily they found it to contribute.
+
+We found no evidence for this (the p-value of a Jonckheere-Terpstra test for a two-sided alternative is 0.25).
+
+## Conclusion
+
+All in all, we are happy with the results of the survey. 
+It seems like our readers are generally happy with the newsletter, and have good ideas on how to improve it. 
+We will discuss how to implement these ideas in the future and keep you updated on our progress.
+
+If you are interested in helping us out, we are always looking for new editors and contributors. Just leave us a message on Discord or GitHub.
+
+Again, thank you very much for your feedback. Rebooting the newsletter was a big ordeal for us,
+and we are happy to see such an active interest in the community. We hope that we can continue to provide you with a newsletter you enjoy.
+
+Until next time!
+
+~ The Rust GameDev Newsletter Team, and Jan Hohenheim in particular