I thought it would be interesting to use some of the forum's metadata I scraped to profile the sites demographics and popularity. In the previous section, I noted that the 'average' sentiment value tracked the 'male' average very closely. This led me to believe that the site was male dominated. Gender data is readily available in the forums metadata, so I thought I would test this assumption.

Indeed, the websites population (or at least active user base) is mostly male. The most popular substances for female authors are MDMA and cocaine. I'm a little surprised that cannabis stories are so heavily male dominated, given the relative accessibility and popularity of the drug.

The forum posts list the published date. I thought it would be interesting to look for trends- what substances are becoming more popular to write about and which are fading from relevance. I went ahead and plotted this data below.

The results are difficult to anaylze. The spikes are seemingly random with no clear trendlines. I do think the spike of stories about amphetamines between 2005-2010 is interesting. I'm also curious about what prompted the huge spike in ketamine stories in 2018. At this time, I don't have the answers to these questions.

There's also a spike in cannabis stories in 2012-2014. This is the period when legalization of the substance occurred in Washington, Colorado, Oregon, and Alaska. Perhaps the incresed accessibility prompted the new writings.