Yesterday I made a short buzz remarking on the apparent growth in posts in Spanish since the start of the year. It has been growing at a quick pace, and I've projected based on the posts so far that April will end up 15% ahead of March in this regard.
I was curious what is driving this exactly, if it is coming from Venezuela, Cuba or elsewhere, and if it's new or returning users driving it. Well, while there has been an increase in Cuban activity, the scale is not sufficient to explain the increase in Spanish posts overall.
I also saw from @arcange's stats posts that there has been an uptick in newly registered users, which I tweeted about, but the timing of the increase does not match up. The trend in #spanish started at the beginning of 2023, where the uptick in newly registered accounts only began 2 weeks ago.
To figure out if it's new or older users, I first calculated the account age of authors per month.
This wasn't quite enough to satisfy me as an answer. You can see from the chart above that March was a relatively good month for new Hispanic users, and they have largely stayed so far in April. The chart also hints at older users potentially coming back, but it could also be that the active users are simply getting older with each month and falling into the older brackets.
In order to make it more clear, I decided to break down the number of authors into cohorts - one for each of the years 2016 to 2019, quarterly cohorts from Q1 2020 to Q1 2022, and monthly cohorts since April 2022.
Finally, this does answer the question more definitively (especially digging into the numbers in Google Sheets). While March was a relatively good month for new users, at least compared to the low levels of onboarding we have had most of 2022 and 2023, the primary driver has been increased activity of older cohorts. Spanish speaking (primarily Venezuelan) users with accounts older than 1 year are not only sticking around more, but are returning to be more active again in the first few months of 2023.