# Can we observe the 24-hour cycle distribution of when votes are cast?

Is there a way to view a distribution of numbers of votes cast (for questions or for answers) over the 24-hour daily cycle? Or over a full weekly cycle? I didn't find such a query at data.SE.

• Voting time stamp is sanitized from the data dumps, since it is possible to reconstruct voting pattern and find who voted what.
– Asaf Karagila Mod
Jan 31, 2015 at 9:44

We can't observe this directly, but we can group posts by the hour of the day in which they were posted and compute the average scores of each group. I wrote a query for this here. From the graph, it shows that the most activity happens near midnight UTC (or whatever $0$ is), with posts averaging a score of $2.45$ and the least happens near 9:00 UTC, with an average post score of $2.18$ - so there's about a $12\%$ difference in the average scores. There is a similar query by someone else here which produces separate results for answers and questions by day of week.