Roman KlimenkoBlogPhotography

Flags and people

February 24, 2019

data

These visualizations are based on data from d3.ru, an online platform based on a rating system that allows users to appraise other individual users as well as content entries and comments posted by them.

Each post and comment posted on d3.ru has a flag that shows the country where the post or comment author's IP is located. The most majority of the visitors are located in Russia (ru), but in one post several commenters appeared to be located in Thailand (th).

It was fairly easy to grab all comments of the Thailanders for all the time and put them all side-by-side on a single timeline: 1550996345 01c0f8353420fb38d8c02239a5424070

This clearly shows us an amazing coincidence - none of the users were in different countries at the same time – Russia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos - seven people always traveling together. Or it's the same person that holds seven accounts? Who knows...

Yet another application of such visualization techniques is a bit opposite. Two users are suspected to be the same person. The reason is that they are usually commenting on the same topics and often one continues another's discussion like someone forgets to change the account by mistake. In this case, the visualization shows that these accounts never wrote a comment from the same country (excluding Russia, because both are living in Russia now). That's unlikely that a person forgets to relogin, never forgets to use the right VPN for different accounts: 1550996912 f7408e492c49fe8b23d0f4d77331a198