Investigate Causes of Decline in Facebook Group Comments
Overview
This question evaluates a data scientist's skills in product analytics, metric instrumentation, causal inference, segmentation, and experimentation for diagnosing a drop in comments-per-post within social network group engagement.
Meta
Aug 4, 2025, 10:55 AM
Data Scientist
Onsite
Analytics & Experimentation
0
0
Scenario
A sharp decline in Comments per Post (CPP) was observed in Facebook Groups last week.
Task
Outline a step-by-step investigation plan to diagnose and address the drop. Your plan should include:
- Definitions and sanity checks for the metric.
- Key data cuts/segmentations to localize the issue.
- A hypotheses tree structured by: user, content, product, and external factors.
- Metrics and analyses to validate or falsify each hypothesis, including how to quantify each factor's contribution to the drop.
- Follow-up experiments or mitigations, with success metrics and guardrails.
Hints
- Be explicit about ratio-metric pitfalls (numerator vs denominator) and cohorting choices.
- Include time comparisons (WoW, DoW, YoY) and seasonality checks.
- Incorporate experiment flags, app versions, geo/language, group types/sizes, and post types.
- Quantify impact by segment and roll up contributions to explain the total drop.
- Propose rapid mitigations (e.g., rollback/ramp holds) when warranted.
Solution
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