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viridiformica t1_j8wianb wrote

Man this is terrible. The log scale completely distorts the trend - essentially costs fell by a factor of 100 between 2017 and 2018, and the rest is trivial

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Dykam t1_j8wlxvx wrote

Nonlogaritmic https://i.imgur.com/z6RZpvC.png

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Dykam t1_j8wm1ju wrote

There's some sense to having the second trend (2018-2021) visible, but it should be on a different graph, the two data pieces are not really compatible.

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Utoko t1_j8wo1zf wrote

or leave it at log scale and it is completely fine. It is labeled where is the issue?

We can make 3 post about it split it up zoom in and out or just use log scale...

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Dykam t1_j8wpt3m wrote

Because the image actually makes a separate point of saying "99.59 % in 5 years", which isn't all that interesting as it's almost the same %, 98.92% in just the first year. In a way, it's presenting the data in a way making it less impressive than it is.

This is /r/dataisbeautiful, not r/whateverlooksnice, so critiquing data presentation seems appropriate.

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Utoko t1_j8x123v wrote

but your suggestions to split it up in multiple graphs is far worse or only show data from 2017 and 2018.

Than everyone would wonder how ho wit developed after 2018.

You can make the same claims about every stock market chart which is displayed in log scale. "These movements don't matter because 96% of the growth was in the past."

but the recent development is very important too. In this case that it still continues to go.

It is still down 35% in the last year, which lets you see we are not even close to the end of the read.

One might argue the 98.92% decrease says a lot less because when something is not done in scale it is always at first extreme expensive. So I don't agree that they make it look less impressive than it is.

So as long as your point is people don't understand how to read log charts I still disagree with you.

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ChronWeasely t1_j90b0of wrote

The "trend line" with the attached conclusion is what makes it egregious and masks the logarithmic nature of the y axis. Like it misses the important points with overfitting.

And the interesting thing is two things

  1. in one year, prices fell by 99%
  2. in subsequent years, prices have fallen another 60%

But it makes it look like there is a continuity that in reality doesnt fit a trend line at all as is seen in the non-logaritmic version

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[deleted] t1_j8wlume wrote

[deleted]

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Maciek300 t1_j8wx19l wrote

Not 75%. It only looks like that. It's actually 98.2% in two years. That's exactly why the post distorts the data.

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[deleted] t1_j8xd141 wrote

[deleted]

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Maciek300 t1_j8xe0vw wrote

Yeah ok it's 75% from 2019 to 2021 but compared to the absolute difference between 2017 and 2018 it's nothing.

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kursdragon2 t1_j8xfq1r wrote

How can you say making something 75% cheaper in 2 years is nothing lmfao? What the fuck are you on. Of course once you get to a certain point the absolute numbers are going to look small but that's still huge improvements.

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Emotional_Squash9071 t1_j8ywo08 wrote

If something cost a billion $ and you brought the price down to a million $, I’m pretty sure you’d think dropping it from a million to 250k is pretty great too.

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polanas2003 t1_j8wvpq1 wrote

Well it is a trade-off of either seeing the big drop and nothing else or seeing the big drop and due to the log level graph also seeing the further advancements clearly.

That's what I was always taught to do to provide a better glimpse of data in statistics and econometrics classes.

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Whiterabbit-- t1_j90bp8z wrote

the further advancements are irreverent. of the 4 dat a points one goes backwards, and the cost only decreased by 50% compared to the drastic cost the year before.

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viridiformica t1_j8wx27r wrote

If this were in a scientific publication where seeing the actual numbers in each year was important, I might agree. But this is a data visualisation purporting to show the trend in costs over 5 years, and it is failing to show the main trend clearly. It's the difference between 'showing the data' and 'showing the story'

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XkF21WNJ t1_j8z2jyf wrote

It's not even a log scale, there's a 0 on there. The scale is all over the place.

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