Estimating Users

DRANK

People often ask me “How many people use Dask?”As with any non-invasive open source software, the answer to this is “I don’t know”.There are many possible proxies for user counts, like downloads, GitHub stars, and so on, but most of them are wildly incorrect. As a project maintainer who tries to find employment for other maintainers, I’m incentivized to take the highest number I can find, but that is somewhat dishonest. That number today is in the form of this likely false statement.Dask has 50-100k daily downloads.This number comes from looking at the Python Package Index (PyPI) (image from pypistats.org)This is a huge number, but is almost certainly misleading. Common sense tells us that there are not 100k new Dask users every day.Bots dominate download countsIf you dive in more deeply to numbers like these you will find that they are almost entirely due to automated processes. For example, of Dask’s 100k new users, a surprising number of them seem to be running Linux.While i…