Honnold and the Growth of Climbing Represented by Mountain Project Users

Hey MP,
  I've had lot's of down time since quarantine, since I'm not climbing I decided to start a project to see how many people have joined MP over the years.

 It appears Honnold and the media have had a noticeable impact on our sport. The CBS "60 Minutes" interview and the Nat Geo "Alone on The Wall" segment seems to correlate closely with the onset. The growth of climbing popularity in terms of new users to the site is just an approximation, this is not hard science, it's not without flaws.

 The majority of climbers didn't join the site until after '16, I haven't done the metrics on that, but can if people would like to explore it more deeply. I will post the dataset to my github if there's anybody who's got the skills to work with it. I estimated there's approximately 1.8 million users, however many of them appear to be abandoned accounts.

Some dates of interest:
2016-08-13
2013-05-14

 If anyone else has any good plot points or ideas as to why those spikes could be there please let me know. I'll put your ideas to the test to see if they line up.

  Another thing, in statistics it's commonly stated that "correlation doesn't mean causation". Don't get offended if you joined after Honnold came on the scene. You could have been climbing for years and just got a computer. It's just to be used a tool for making informed decisions, it's not gospel.

 P.S. I know scraping MP is against the T.O.S., please don't ban me. I didn't want to start another account to post this, I figured we're all friends and no harm will come of this.

Toss a line on there for the Honnold El Cap Solo and for when Free Solo/Dawn Wall movies came out.

Match it to the demise of RC com  

Jim Tittwrote: Match it to the demise of RC com  

and supertopo

I joined in 2003.

Damn that curve looks alot like the virus.  

Aligns nicely with the rise of the Convenience Culture.

Which is funny when you think about it. Never have we spent so much effort to make harder climbing, easier!

Apparently I joined because Honnold was on 60 minutes. I mean, I'd been climbing for years before that, but I guess I wanted to get online and see if anyone else found his doe eyes as attractive as I did. 

Apparently I'm an elder, I joined in the first half of 2009, but I also remember the days of Climbing Boulder, Climbing Devils Lake, Climbing Joshua Tree, and Climbing Moab.

Also, it seems pretty clear to me that the defining event that led to this site taking off in terms of members is REI buying MP and starting to advertise it in all of its stores, which occurred in 2015.

Jay Egglestonwrote: I joined in 2003.

Yeah, there's a date from 1969. I suppose it's an admin, or someone who's got access to the database. Was the site running for a while before it went public? It seems like there's a few entry's from before the official launch date.

Anybody recall the date when they started allowing creation of accounts without your full name? Once throwaways and troll accounts enter the mix, I suspect "new user" statistics become far less reliable.

The seasonality of the whole thing is interesting as well.

Carolinawrote: Damn that curve looks alot like the virus.  

What do you think are the good steps to flatten the curve? Also, is it sensible of me to consider the possibility of me having to start to worry about this?

Chuck Parkswrote: Anybody recall the date when they started allowing creation of accounts without your full name? Once throwaways and troll accounts enter the mix, I suspect "new user" statistics become far less reliable.

The seasonality of the whole thing is interesting as well.

I've not entered any duplicates into the dataset, they are all unique based on 'userId'. But you're right, I was going to use the 'last visited' metric to find 'true new users' but ended up not messing with it.

Fehim Hasecicwrote:

What do you think are the good steps to flatten the curve? Also, is it sensible of me to consider the possibility of me having to start to worry about this?

Clearly we need to defund the bolts.  

Could just be the normal growth of a popular forum site?

John Reevewrote: Could just be the normal growth of a popular forum site?

That shit is real though. Eat cheese>>>get fat>>>lack agility to untangle self from bedsheets. 

Flatten the curve.  

Short Fall Seanwrote:

That shit is real though. Eat cheese>>>get fat>>>lack agility to untangle self from bedsheets. 

I can't argue with that.

I never heard of MP until a few months before I joined it. I saw the OG banter and trolling and knew I was home.

John Reevewrote: Could just be the normal growth of a popular forum site?

I mean, anything is possible, but it's unlikely. The site saw around 15 new users a day for the first 7.5 years, with many days going with no new users. Within 6 months of the airing of the Nat Geo "Alone on the Wall" film, daily user count tripled. Within two years, the site doubled it's users, which had taken the previous 8 years to obtain.

It could all be a coincidence, but the data suggests otherwise. I don't think anyone is going to deny Honnold's impact on climbing.

Ty Harlackerwrote: It could all be a coincidence, but let's get real, is anyone going to deny Honnold's impact on climbing?

I can't deny Honnold's influence.  

I still feel like there could be at least two confounding factors:

- REI Marketing
- the growth of a site as it hits a "critical mass"

The growth curve to me looks like a normal graph you'd see with, say, uber cab rides or airBNB rentals.