Reddit's Traffic is Down 3.36% Month-Over-Month, According to SimilarWeb
Reddit's Traffic is Down 3.36% Month-Over-Month, According to SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb has just released traffic estimates for June. According to these estimates, Reddit's traffic has seen a 3.36% month-over-month decrease.
For comparison, here's how traffic has changed for other popular social networking websites:
- Discord.com: +0.51%
- Twitter.com: -1.65%
- Instagram.com: -1.35%
- Facebook.com: -3.18%
- TikTok.com: +0.77%
- Pinterest.com: -2.27%
- Youtube.com: -2.02%
Source: https://www.similarweb.com/website/reddit.com/#overview
On the one hand, this doesn't seem like a lot. But on the other, this is just for June. A lot of people left or drastically cut down their usage at the very end of June, and we're not seeing this reflected in the data yet.
Even so, no company wants to say they've lost 3% of their customers. With 1.7 billion total, that's still 51 million people. It's a notable loss, especially for a company trying to become profitable and have an IPO.
I used Apollo right up until it shut down, and I haven’t touched Reddit since. I’m guessing I’m not the only one.
Same with me. I haven’t deleted my Reddit account yet, but will be doing that soon, after I delete or overwrite my comments of 10 years there.
Between Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon, I have plenty to keep me occupied in what used to be my Reddit-scrolling time.
I used sync up until the 13th or so, then started limiting my reddit usage, and increased my lemmy usage until July 1st. Now I'm solely on lemmy on mobile, and only see reddit on desktop when I come across a search I need.
Same. I still have the app as a reminder but this is my home now.
Weekend I’m going to see about spinning up my own instance.
I really missed Reddit at first and it took a while to get TestFlight on Memmy and figure this out but it’s looking good so far.
Same, it took me to 7/1 for me to finally uninstall RIF. Let's wait and see what July's numbers look like
Same
I agree. The real change will be from 1 July onwards since none of us can use our apps anymore.
Even if 3% is a low number, I guarantee that 3% were reddits more active users and content creators.
If most of the quality content slows to a trickle users will continue to leave and look for more viable platforms.
It's not 3% of users, it's 3% of traffic. This could be caused by 0.1% of power users leaving.
no company wants to say they’ve lost 3% of their customers
Reddit doesn't see users as customers.
They are the product. A number that you can sell to advertisers and shareholders.That model started with literal radio. It's not a new thing. We are the consumers and the advertisers are the customers. It's kinda like how children are the consumers of toys but the parents are the customers. It actually makes business much harder because you have to keep two groups satisfied. The product is still airtime(radio), and nobody likes ads but they are sharing the space and funding the transmitter.
Don't forget to donate to your local independent stations, folks. Radio is not free! Neither is Lemmy.
No company wants to say they've lost 30% of their top development, marketing and QA personnel.
They can still sell the raw product numbers, for as long as advertisers and shareholders don't realize the product has turned to shit.
I think this an overly simplistic way to look at the dynamic. Users are the primary customer, and they don't provide any direct revenue to the company. Their value is in attracting the secondary customers though, who directly pay the company to access the users. Bring a primary customer implies that the company still needs to treat you as a customer and at least not openly antagonize you. They can't take you for granted as a product. There is no secondary customer without you.
It's like bars that advertise free drinks for women on certain nights. The women aren't directly paying the bar, but the men who come to the bar because of them makes it a net profit. I'm sure there's other examples of this primary/secondary customer dynamic. Anything cheap for kids that sells expensive stuff to parents for instance.
They also don't want to lose 3% of their product.
How many people are less engaged in the internet at the beginning of summer because they’re on vacation or partying? I would think drops like this as the weather improves are pretty normal.
spaz: were not profitable, heres ways were gonna become more profitable.
redditors: ugh leaves
spaz: your small protest from the landed gentry cant hurt me.
redditors: ok, bye.
spaz: jgvbefgbaegbeQANGBLEw
In history terms, 3% is everything. I remember seeing a documentary where a guy claimed that every coup in history, in which 3% of the population were ardently dedicated to the cause, has been successful.
I am wondering how user count is calculated.
I guarantee you that a huge percentage of Redditors have multiple accounts. Many of which might be inactive. Are all accounts ever created on Reddit still considered part of their current total or are only accounts active in the 6 or 12 months count? If people are legitimately leaving Reddit, I think their losses are going to steamroll because they won't just lose one user, but instead they will lose that one user and their 2 or 3 alternate accounts as well.
Next month or three are going to look like a bloodybath for Reddit.
Can't wait!
Yeah, I was using Lemmy and Reddit in parallel throughout June (aside from the blackout days, where I stayed off of Reddit out of solidarity,) and only really drastically reduced my Reddit usage this month.
Same. I spent most of June trying to find a lemmy instance to join. Quit cold turkey on 1st July along with nuking my post history. Keeping my account till 31 July just in case they decide to revert my deleted posts.
Think of how many ‘users’ are bots that likely won’t continue to work since no one would pay the monthly sub to bot Reddit like in the past.
Also, this data isn’t from Reddit. It’s from SimilarWeb. They track browser access to websites, not API calls. Reddit absolutely won’t report their drop in API access, which is where the largest drop will be.
I suspect half that drop is from me alone, lol.
Reddit lost a LOT of their power users. Even if the general traffic isn't that badly dented, it means a lot of the best content and conversations will not go back. Reddit will spiral down to a 9gag clone.
I lurk the frontpage occasionally and I've already noticed the Reddit atmosphere has gotten ... weird.
Little-known, content-churning subreddits are bubbling to the top because of all the other blackouts and desertions. Fringe viewpoints and wacko opinions that would normally get downvoted to the bottom of a thread are now out in the open because there's no voice of reason to hold them back.
And the kind of people that are still on there, acting as if everything is fine (or, God forbid, better(???) than it was before the revolts) ... it's a very strange place now.
The meltdowns are something else.
On one smaller sub that participated in the blackout people were seriously accusing mods of rigging the votes to stay closed for longer. Of course nothing actually indicated that, and neither did they present any evidence, they just couldn't stand not getting their content.
Same! I went to check it out earlier and the frontpage had a couple of subreddits I recognized but am not interested in, and the rest were all subreddits I had never heard of before. I also thought the scores seemed weirdly low, but not 100% sure about that since I dont usually pay super close attention. At least the weird vibe was pretty helpful in getting me to hop off, versus getting sucked in to browsing around more.
Reddit is pretty much at the point where you can open any thread on the front page and the comments will be indistinguishable from a Facebook comment section.
9gag... That's a word I haven't seen in a long time.
Reddit will stay, heck Digg if still around. It won't be the same though.
Reddit will spiral down to a 9gag clone.
Back in the day, I discovered Reddit because people in the comments on 9gag would say a certain post was stolen from reddit.
I was a sucker for rage comics, so r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu (aka f7u12) was my gateway drug.
I got onto Reddit from a rage comic app. 11 years ago.
I'd start a f7u12 community here, but I haven't seen a classic rage comic that was actually worth a wet slap in years
On the other hand, most upvoted posts and comments on redit are far away from best. I expect most of those people will not even notice, they just scroll over reposts and bot.
Even the porn subs are starting to be overrun by onlyfans spammers
I thought they always were.
I mean, hey, free titties but always there.
If only people would actually stop using Reddit instead of doing these useless “protests” like they do in /r/videos. They're still using the site, that's what Reddit wants...
I've been waiting for my third party app to break. Boost finally stopped working an hour ago so I signed up here.
Welcome!
The Lemmy boost version is already in development and you can sign up for it already on the app store!
Welcome aboard! There’s now over 400,000 of us! (Source).
Boost is still working for me, but I haven't logged in/engaged since the blackout. If it does go any day now, I'm okay with that.
Same, ‘cept my 3PA died a few hours before it should’ve. Reddit admins are clowns.
It's still working for me?
The protests aren't all useless, necessarily.
Subs that go NSFW are depriving Reddit of advertising revenue, and sites that change their purpose are likely to drive away some users who don't want to shitpost, who might then go looking for alternatives.
except they are useless when reddit will just remove anybody that doesn't play ball
I doubt it's seriously hurting Reddit, if at all. People would really hurt Reddit if they just stopped using it entirely. No posting, no commenting and no lurking.
They’ve been astroturfing with bots to pump those numbers
There are soooo many GPT comments and threads on Reddit, at least when I left on the first. I imagine it’s going to get worse and worse now.
It's trivial to setup a LLM designed to argue or astroturf a point now. That's the problem.
I have been noticing a few here and there on Lemmy too. Unsure how to report it as I kept getting errors.
Reddit started with nothing but sock puppet accounts created by the devs, so I could definitely see them doing the same thing to show "activity".
Think about all those running power delete suite or similar.
I see a lot of people saying, "I can't believe it was only a 3% drop," and I'd like to offer some context as to why there's not enough data here to really tell a story, yet. It could go a few different ways.
The Reddit protests in June were a big deal, not just on Reddit or Lemmy, but to the media at-large. Traffic surely saw a huge influx of people wanting to look at the dumpster fire. I know that I myself used Reddit a lot leading up to the blackouts, since it was, in a sense, the last hurrah of Reddit as we knew it. The Spez AMA would have driven traffic. The NSFW sub protests would have driven traffic. All those news articles linked to Reddit directly, and they would have also driven traffic.
Even with all that, there's still a decrease in traffic. As others have said, July will be a better metric for the actual damage done, since the media has largely moved on and aren't driving as many visits, and 3PAs are toast.
These numbers would have been more representative if we could have had more than a quarter to look at. What was the QoQ trajectory before this? For all we know, this could have indicated business as usual, or it could have indicated something much bigger, depending on what the traffic metrics over the past 12-24 months could show us.
I also would have liked to see the history for unique sessions and unique visitors. If there was a huge influx of unique visitors compared to the past few months, but traffic was still decreased overall, then that would indicate it came from news clicks or bots.
Basically what I'm saying is that the data doesn't paint any kind of real picture right at this moment. That doesn't mean there was no impact though. Time will tell.
Looking at the pages for lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, lemmy.world, kbin.social, as well as lemm.ee paints an interesting, if expected, picture.
For one thing, lemmy.ml is categorized as "Games > Games - Other (In United States)" which made me scratch my head to the point of hurting my scalp. The rest are uncategorized (which is better than being miscategorized, imo).
Now, for the stats:
Instance Total Visits for June 2023 % Change from May 2023 Bounce Rate Pages per Visit Average Visit Duration #1 Incoming Traffic Source (from social media) reddit.com¹ 1.7B -3.36% 37.98% 6.21 8:24 Youtube (52.48%) lemmy.world 3.5M n/a² 38.12% 6.62 8:44 Reddit (97.29%) kbin.social 2.9M +5000% 26.24% 11.2 9:18 Reddit (93.92%) lemmy.ml 1.5M +1716% 51.79% 5.55 3:54 Reddit (98.86%) feddit.de 791.7K +5000% 55.88% 2.76 3:57 Reddit (98.31%) beehaw.org 790.1K +5000% 35.48% 4.50 5:44 Reddit (96.24%) lemmy.ca 186.4K +1615% 69.14% 2.45 1:05 Reddit (100%) lemm.ee 167.5K +5000% 29.58% 6.73 5:18 Reddit (86.81%) - ¹ --
reddit.comis included as a point of comparison - ² --
lemmy.worlddidn't exist yet in May 2023
We can see that the larger instances are already performing well in comparison to reddit when it comes to "interaction" statistics. It's a surprise, however that
kbin.socialtrounces everyone else it was compared to--even comparing favorably withlemmy.worldin visit numbers. In comparison,lemmy.mlperformed quite badly especially in bounce rate and average visit duration. Someone who's better equipped than me in analyzing these figures can perhaps do a better anaylsis, but from what I can see, we're not doing that bad here.I've also added
lemm.eeinto the mix just for good measure (and perhaps as a proxy for smaller-ish instances), and it's doing quite good as well.
EDITS:
Something to keep in mind to contextualize the interaction statistics: the density of contributors to lurkers in these numbers will be drastically higher here due to the greater barrier to entry as well as the average user type of the migration. It should be expected that the average user in a niche/early-adopter community will be more active.
Not me! I intend to be just as much a lurker as I was on Reddit!
Lemmy.ca is +1615%
Okay, but 52% of traffic on reddit is coming from Youtube??? Those channels that just compile reddit posts must really be helping Reddit. Lets make some Lemmy reading channels
As far as I understood that stat, it's traffic coming from "social media sites" that's counted there. What their definition of a "social media site", I've got no idea--especially not since they include Youtube in that designation.
So from what I can tell the visits to the main lemmy instances are only ~.5% compared to total visits to reddit (1.7 billion vs 9 million). Smaller instances might bump that up to .7% or so. Reddit's 3% drop in visits might be mostly due to people using the site less, while transfers to lemmy account for only a fraction of that. Still cool, though, hopefully we can keep the momentum going over the next couple months.
I really wish someone can compile the figures for all Lemmy instances (and Kbin) so that we can make such a comparison. But yeah, other alternatives also popped up such as Tildes, Squabble, Raddle. I suppose that can also make up for part of the missing 3%. Of course, there's also a sizeable number that have simply stopped using Reddit (be it in protest or other reasons--such as seasonal variability, as in people are actually touching grass!).
I actually forgot to include Tildes, Squabble and Raddle into the table, but then again, I was only trying to compare what we gained here against what Reddit has lost. I hope that this momentum (loss for Reddit, gain for the Threadiverse) keeps going. But more importantly, that we keep the engagement here at a high level in both quantity and quality.
Where's this data coming from?
Same website as used in the OP, SimilarWeb.
- ¹ --
I just realized that today is the first day in YEARS that I didn’t access Reddit. Sad, but it is what it is, and entirely their fault.
It was my primary social media site for over 10 years, and only one in probably the past five after ditching Facebook.
All I ever used to access it was baconreader. When the first talk of killing off the API started with the rate hike, I had a sinking feeling this was the end.
Rode it out till the last day, and reflexively kept opening baconreader just to realise again it was offline.
Decided to give Lemmy a try, and while it took a couple days to get it sorted, I have to say, for my daily browsing fix, it's more than enough.
Yes, reddit is a giant database, and when google searches take me there I'll view the info, but for everyday use, lurking, posting, and commenting, never again.
Not sure of its bias, user saturation, bot, shills, demographic, or what, but while smaller, the quality and content of the comments here just seems better. It reminds me of the early days on fark or even back on IRC.
It really does piss me off that greed over an IPO ruined something that had been a part of my life for so long.
I am enough of a grumpy old bastard that unless they fix the API and baconreader starts up again, I'm done. The internet is a big weird place, and I'm happy to go see other parts of it.
I never realized how significant killing third-party apps would be for me personally, but since Apollo stopped working my desire to use Reddit on my phone has dropped to zero. I've completely replaced it with Discord and "traditional" social media in my downtime.
If they kill old.reddit on desktop too, that will be the final nail in the coffin for me.
I haven't actively browsed Reddit since the blackout. Almost a month, it's flown by and I'm still fine
(Actively meaning I've accidentally clicked a link or two that pointed to it, but I never opened the app myself)
I'm the same.
Admittedly the time away from Reddit has been a boon for me as I've been consistently better at using spare time here and there time to actual hobbies and responsibilities.
I was a heavy user before, for sure. I used to scroll Reddit for hours a day. I uninstalled my app when the blackouts started. If I do a google search where the answer is on reddit, i'll still look at that answer. But for the most part, I am gone. Seems like a lot of people are all bark no bite though.
I reddit a LOT at work so I was probably spending roughly 3-4 hours a day with reddit at least in the background and I haven't actually intentionally visited the site for two weeks.
Honestly, my mental health is improving. Reddit is a shitty outrage machine that's astroturfed by corporations and fascists.
Did the same thing and deleted my account. My muscle memory can't find the app and my battery last a full day.
I've just put Connect for Lemmy in the same place where the Boost for Reddit icon was on my home screen and the problem is solved.
I open all of my apps by usings iOS search feature, i'll occasionally still type "apollo" and be like, "oh yeah, i dont have this anymore". It isn't as often now though, compared to the first few weeks.
If I do a google search where the answer is on reddit
This is what I'm missing the most, because I've learned to automatically add "reddit" to most of my searches, since I usually could find a better discussion there.
But now it's useless - if you need a product recommendation, it's filled with bots obviously schilling for whoever paid, fake reviews, and it's generally useless. And technical questions mostly lead to subreddits that were closed, and I have no idea what state are they in now - but I still don't want to give them traffic.
But what to do now? The internet is basically unusable by now. Everyone and now even AIs are writing blog posts or videos about things they barely understand, you have literaly thousands of AI generated pages about programming questions, some of them are outright wrong, and if you need something more complex than a single command - for example how to write a good video game AI architecture (especially this search term is FUCKED. I need to rewrite steerring, navigation and behaviors for a video game, but good luck searching for "video game AI" in the last few months...), most of the articles or tutorials are pretty shitty.
Every search term is filled with mediocre blog posts, usually copy-pasted between eachother. I literally don't know how to use the internet for deeply researching a topic anymore - everything is just barely scratching the surface in the most popularized way possible.
I guess I just have to start searching on scholar.google.com...
Don't know if this is of any help but here is a good video. It's about a video game ai concept I've not heard of before: https://youtu.be/9gf2MT-IOsg
Idiocracy seems to be getting closer and closer to being a reality
This gets made back by September.
95% of people who use reddit use the official app or website, and don't notice a single thing except the occasional stray John Oliver meme.
Not enough hobby communities left.
I thought about this comment, and realized that somehow, I just don't care so much anymore. Instead of worrying about what I left behind, I'm looking forward to what's ahead of us.
I think it's because even before the whole 3d-party-app drama, there already was this undefined feeling that Reddit's best days are behind it. Maybe it's the effect of ad money and monetization, or it's the inevitable trend towards low quality content that comes with mass adoption, probably it's both.
Whatever the cause, in most subreddits, the old Facebook-style rot had already set in. Once-cool subs now being an endless barrage of tired memes, bots farming karma, and people being assholes. The things I joined for years ago, the engaging discussion, random encounters with amazing experts, the cutting-edge internet anarchy, it's all already long gone.
When I opened the app (Baconreader in my case), I only did it out of habit, to then spendy time scrolling through an endless list of things that made me slightly go "heh".
So, maybe most people will stay on Reddit for now, and probably I will have to leave behind certain communities instead of finding direct replacements. But I see that as a good thing. As long as even just 2% of Reddit's users make it here, I'm excited it will grow into something much better than what I left behind.
Well said. We're onto something good here. The discussions are great, & I think part of the reason is because comments aren't getting upvoted like crazy or downvoted into oblivion, nobody is karma whoring with stupid puns or references. Anyone here is just hanging out and shooting the breeze, it's goddamn refreshing. It won't keep that underground feel forever, but I'm glad to be here right now.
That is how I feel as well. I haven't completely given up on reddit just yet, but my usage is going down, and I open reddit more by accident than anything. Lemmy is my new default and I'm not complaining.
Most people are lurkers though, I'd wager a greater proportion of active posters left.
Most lurkers view the Twitter/TikTok reposts Reddit is full of, which have not slowed down, or the ""advice"" subreddits, which have not slowed down either.
The content that people like us like, some of it has moved away, but the people who are willing to chase that content are a very small minority.
I think you are being very pessimistic about this. Reddit's collapse will not be a linear process. If it happens mind you.
But if it happens:
- First the most active 3% leaves. But the 3% creates a huge hole in the overall activity of the site. So another 3% leaves. And the site will at an ever increasing speed reach the point of no return. Reddits main user base is the drooling masses who want to read gossip instead of working.
But if there is no free entertainment, the masses just move on. Basically all a platform is, is it's core audience.
I've starting going to Reddit less and less, but if I do, my frontpage has gone to shit. I can't even recognize it, the few instances I visited regularly are read-only and since I've unsubscribed the most popular default ones, there's almost nothing left for me.
Which is good, since thanks to that I'm slowly learning to just automatically starting Lemmy instead of Reddit as my go-to social network.
Honestly, that's fine. Good for Reddit.
It's just not a place for me anymore.
Havent been there since the day of the blackout, not missing anything.
The reddit we fell in love with is gone. Even if the website is still there.
The more I've heard from friends still using it the less desire I have to go back. At first I was gonna boycott until the end of the month but it sounds like it's not even that good now that a lot of active posters left. Haven't felt much urge to go back, although I do need to find new communities for some of the more niche subs I was on. My houseplant and travel hacks discussion has been very lacking since I left Reddit...
Most of that traffic is probably lurkers and content consumers. Reddit will continue chugging along for a bit, but the loss of power users and mods is about guaranteed to wither the platform over time.
There are enough reposts to keep them busy for a while I think. I swear the same post would get reposted a few weeks after the original and get just as many or more upvotes than the first time. And the top comments were usually the same or similar.
That’s the bots at work though. Create a circle-jerk of upvotes on certain topics with nothing inventive or new in between. I have yet to see a bot(like response) here. Most comments are well thought out. And the posts are pretty relevant and no ads!!!
I swear 50% of askreddit questions were bots recycling questions. You could pump it up to 100% and I doubt most lurkers would notice the difference.
Same deal with subs about cute things or videos of crazy stuff. Reddit has enough of a backlog that casual consumers probably wouldn’t even notice a slow rotation of it. I’ve seen many times somebody point out reposts and get slammed with “Well it’s new to me!” comments.
The only thing that might noticably suffer are meme subs since memes have to follow current topics, but honestly how hard can it be to make a bot that creates current event memes based on templates? The templates themselves are already run into the ground.
One point to keep in mind is that drama also brings engagement IN, not just out. When the drama subsides, the temporary boost in activity from new users or lurkers will go down too.
That being said, the percent decrease was always gonna be in the single digits. The average redditor was never gonna stick with a prolonged protest of a service that remains free to use.
I still visit reddit maybe once a day for 10 minutes for niche subs or communities that aren't built up here. If those communities develop here, I will fully cut out reddit.
Edit: also when noting that I use Lemmy amount 90% of the time now, but my overall usage of Lemmy/reddit has gone down. Probably for the better, because I started reading again.
niche subs or communities that aren't built up here
Oh how I wish someone would make a shittymobilegameads community.
...or for me to get the willpower and motivation to do it myself.
That seems small given the number of Redditors here
The number of users here is pretty minuscule compared to the Reddit userbase
That's true, but also bear in mind most of reddit's active monthly users are barely interacting with the site (e.g., through clicking in off a search result, or following a link).
The average user engagement per day is in the single digit minutes, and the average post / comment count per day is <1... I know I used reddit a lot more than that.
So as the numbers drop further in July, consider that the share of highly engaged, highly active, content creating users has likely dropped by far more.
To lemmy I'd guess the numbers seem a lot bigger. But by reddits standards yea its a small percentage.
refuse to use the default reddit app so here I am. I miss rif but lemmy is filling the void at least.
Quality is more important than quantity. The people who left Reddit are more likely to be engaged and create content. Most people on Reddit just consume content. If nobody is there to create any, those will leave too.
Completely agree with you there. I’m loving the fragmentation that Reddit caused because it seems I’m with a fragment of the user base that engages and shares incredible insights and knowledge.
Traffic is likely not just users, but bots or scripts scraping sites and whatever.
Remember that many people didn't get on Lemmy/Kbin until July 1st. The July stats will be much more indicative of how many people left or cut down their use.
If it wasn’t for my photography, I’d delete instagram. Holy shit is it pay-to-play a cesspool. And I’m being targeted for ads for all kinds of ponzi schemes and crypto and FOREX scams. Probably from watching Coffeezilla videos.
We’ll see how Lemmy picks up. I’m really liking it, thus far. Right now we’re looking at Reddit like a former, toxic partner that we want to spite. Lately I was just going on the World News, Ukraine war mega thread.
If it wasn’t for my photography, I’d delete instagram
It's funny, but my photography is precisely the reason I'm not on Instagram. Since day 1 I've never thought it is a good place for actual artistic photography; indeed it kinda directly undermined artistic photography back in the day with the "all photos must be square" rule. I've always considered Instagram more of a place to share snapshots. Flickr isn't what it once was, but it's always been more of a true photography-focused social media site.
Just like Etsy. Its a horrible place to try and build a business and be creative and make money, and is being overrun by dropshipped tat, but its where everyone goes to get nice things, so its where people have to sell
I’m a hobbyist and I went there to get something nice and save myself some time making it. I expected high quality reasonable cost and I found average/low quality high cost. Disappointed.
I'm in the same boat. Been trying a few different Instagram alternatives for a few years but the user bases are all too small. Pixelfed and Vero seem decent but too much of a ghost town to feel it's worth continuing to post.
I haven't tried Pixelfed yet. I just got into the Fediverse and several instances on Lemmy. So I'll eventually try Pixelfed. But 500px and Flickr seemed kind of dead to me. Vero and Vsco, I've heard mixed things, but also ghost-towns.
It's to the point in IG that not even close friends nor family, see what I post. Adam Mosseri and Mark can fuck right off.
That may sound like not a lot, but Facebook as been hemorraging users for a few years now, if they're losing users at about the same rate as Facebook, that's a big oof.
I think the big deal will be if it's sustained. Losing a bunch of users for a month isn't a big deal if they come back, or at least stop leaving. If Reddit loses 3% of its users every month for a year then things will be pretty dire for them.
Can't say I've got much sympathy for Reddit, though.
Agreed on all counts, but y'know doesn't look good before an IPO, I hope it gets worse.
Facebook "lost" a lot of users when GenZ decided they didn't want to make accounts, but Instagram and (likely) Threads, did a fine job supplementing that. Meta corporation as a whole doesn't have a big issue with maintaining their userbase.
I think it will go down a lot faster now that they've blocked API calls to NSFW subs.
Actually... that's something I have doubts about. It isn't all NSFW subs, just the porn ones... and how many people actually comment on porn subs, instead of just scrolling and... well, "consuming" it?
My guess is users of porn subs will use the official app and not care about it.
The point of those porn subs (generally) is to drive engagement to paid sites. If the content creators find that there is less traffic from Reddit, they're going to stop posting there, regardless of the app.
But viewing a page is definitely counted as traffic.
I'm genuinely surprised the Lemmy exodus has been as large as 3%. Reddit will be just fine. This isn't like Digg > Reddit.
I mean, this is actually a lot like Digg > Reddit, the same class of user has migrated. It's just that Reddit has long outgrown that techy/nerdy demographic. I doubt they'll miss us much.
Nor do I want that other 97% to follow us to Lemmy, especially.
For me personally it still needs to be far bigger though. On Reddit literally every bite of news was posted and discussed for many of the hobbies I have, large or niche. Yet on Lemmy some of my interests are barely represented nevermind being a reliable source of information and news.
I can say what's helped me tremendously is finding a niche instance that aligns with your interests instead of the huge generic ones
Post it then! This reminds me of the olden days when I used to use fairly niche forums, being the person to start a thread was pretty common. Reddit was so big that by the time you found out about something someone had already posted it. Different times over here.
To be fair, this just says that Reddit traffic is down. It doesn’t say where that traffic went. I assume that most people who reduced their Reddit usage didn’t replace it with Lemmy usage. Sucks for those people!
I share your sentiment up until the last bit which feels like gate keeping. There are enough healthy discussions coming from a lot of people outside of that demographic to make me want them to follow us here. Plus it's bad for reddit if they do. I worry about the negative effects, where quick and easy comments that are easier to digest get upvoted over well researched and thoughtful comments. But I'm hopeful that we can learn from the past and develop tools to better incentivize people to write thoughtful comments. I think the fediverse has the potential to help us avoid dumbification of content, but it also brings greater risk of creating echo chambers.
I'm not trying to be gatekeeper at all. But we are absolutely not ready for an overnight deluge of 100 Million users. Nor does Lemmy have the technology in place to combat shills, influencers, bots, scammers and all the other crap that would be here next week if all of Reddit migrated.
I really want the Fediverse to grow, but I want that process to be organic. I want the servers, apps, mod tools to grow with the users.
This is likely to not even include the exodus from the 1st of July onwards also. That's when my partner and I moved over here. Will be interesting to look again at the start of August, check the true scale of their fuck-up.
It will be much more interesting to see a year from now, after most of the actual content posters and decent mods have left. 🍿
I don't think that many content posters will leave. Sure, in tech oriented communities they will, as they are the ones most receptive to fediverse or other alternatives.
But painters, photographers, historians, chefs... etc are a large part of what make reddit great. And plenty of those don't really give a fuck about the platform. They will just use the official app and move on.
Yes! That's what happened with Facebook too. Techy people left the platform long ago but it's still really useful for other types of users, the ones who don't really want to invest time into learning how to use a different platform.
I deleted my account 7 years ago, but my SO is still using hers and it brings her real value. She is active in the local communities, uses the marketplace, etc.
Ironically, I've been trying to get her to use Reddit more over the past few years...
Appears that this doesn't include July numbers. I think most of the people leaving Reddit, myself included, didn't do it until our 3rd party apps actually got killed on July 1st. Will be interesting to see these numbers at the end of the month.
I'd say I slowed down my usage, as I looked for alternatives. But yeah, once Apollo stopped working, I cut out Reddit cold turkey.
Same. Apollo or bust.
Now happy wefwef.app and Tildes user, though. So not all is bad (=
I'm slowly weening myself off, but the main problem is that Reddit has a massive backlog information that's still useful to reference. Almost any question you search online comes back with a reddit thread.
Lemmy and the fediverse has a ton of potential, but we're really lacking in terms of content parity. Hell, even just communities vs subreddits.
Yeah but that will change over time, I think we've got the potential to make much better tech communities than Reddit had especially as this increasingly becomes the defacto nerd hangout
Exactly.. My Boost for Reddit stopped working on the 5th and here I am. 😇
My third party app is still running for me so honestly I'm still using reddit for a lot of browsing. It doesn't have to be all or nothing though thats my take. I'll slowly move here if it grows and if not well, we will see.
Your kind isn't welcome here! Lol just kidding. What app still works?
I would really like to be a fly on the wall at their meetings to know if that is in line with their expectations or not.
Note that this only goes up to June. The July numbers are the more interesting ones IMO. Stats I've seen show that post/comment volume is about the same, but they could have bot accounts making up the difference.
I wonder if spez will be dumb enough to try to hide their bot use from investors and get sued after the deal when things get revealed. Or maybe he'll be stuck covering that up for the rest of his life.
Yeah I stuck around to enjoy the show through June. At 9pm EDT on 30JUN, Apollo stopped loading posts and that was the last time I saw Reddit.
Could be I’m an unusual case, but I imagine if Reddit was actually damaged in this fiasco the JUL numbers will tell the tale.
Would be interesting to see engagement metrics as well.
Yeah, even just 3% could be very meaningful because it could be a lot of content creators who hopped ship.
And judging by how much content we have here on Lemmy - yeah, I’m thinking Reddit lost a bunch of valuable users and will only get worse with time.
You're right - that's the important part!
Lol the only reason I clicked into this is because the front page truncated "Discord" to "Disco" and I wanted to learn more about this next new social networking site...!
I'm ready for a funk-based social media.
Zero surprise. Most people are living life on autopilot. They will continue to ignore major issues—like politics, climate change, and corporations mistreating people—to our collective long-term detriment. Anecdotally, I have friends who don’t give two fucks about such important things. Instead, they focus almost purely on MMA, reality TV, and stand-up comedy.
I mean, we all have hobbies but damn, pay attention and take a stand on serious issues that affect us all.
for goodness sake this is one site policy change not politics andclimate change it's good to care about things but sheesh if you try to connect to everything everywhere you'll end up burning out.
Sure, that’s fair; there’s certainly a balance to be had.
Lemmy.world is on there too - it wasn't tracked in May but in June it was up to 3.5M visits with 970K unique visitors, so starting off pretty well.
A well deserved outcome. Companies need to realize that they are nothing without their customers/users. An undeserved arrogance can only lead to eventual downfall.
To be fair, 3% of traffic missing is not going to be their downfall. They managed to rid themselves of virtually all third party clients in one swoop and had to trade in only a fraction of their monthly engagement - they'll sell it as streamlining.
It might go either way but it’s a good start. A loss is still a loss and those lost users will find new homes, hopefully in the fediverse. Even if it doesn’t cause an outright bankruptcy, anything to help promote a freer internet is good in my book.
Probably not, but they were still the users that cared enough about the platform to actually spend money on an app just to use it. I have to imagine that the amount of quality posts and comments will decline.
It's difficult to measure just how impactful that'll be over the next few months or years.
It won't lead to their downfall. Let's not be delusional here. The got out of this "protest" without a scratch.
I've noticed a considerable dip in the quality of posts on reddit. And I think the bots are becoming overwhelming in posting and commenting. People are gonna notice. Let's see how it develops from here.
Not enough to matter. Not even out of step with any other social media site lol. We’re doomed
Reddit doesn't need to be destroyed in order for Lemmy to succeed. There is plenty of room on the internet for multiple communities.
Right. I'd be happy for the IPO to go south just for petty vengeance, but I'm not angry about Reddit. It's been good to me for years, until it wasn't.
I'm on lemmy now, and I'm happy here. Don't need Reddit to burn, my needs are fulfilled. They can do what they want, and the world keeps turning.
The data is from June. I suspect July will show a more meaningful decline. I still used it in June apart from the blackout. After July 1st I login for maybe a few minutes via the desktop site to check the frontpage for missing news. That's about it.
Same. TBH, I didn't really pay much attention to all the protesting. But when Bacon Reader stopped working, I started looking for a new app.
I thought about this comment, and realized that somehow, I just don't care so much about what happens to Reddit anymore. Instead of worrying about what I left behind, I'm looking forward to what's ahead of us.
I think it's because even before the whole 3d-party-app drama, there already was this undefined feeling that Reddit's best days are behind it. Maybe it's the effect of ad money and monetization, or it's the inevitable trend towards low quality content that comes with mass adoption, probably it's both.
Whatever the cause, in most subreddits, the old Facebook-style rot had already set in. Once-cool subs now being an endless barrage of tired memes, bots farming karma, and people being assholes. The things I joined for years ago, the engaging discussion, random encounters with amazing experts, the cutting-edge internet anarchy, it's all already long gone.
When I opened the app (Baconreader in my case), I only did it out of habit, to then spendy time scrolling through an endless list of things that made me slightly go "heh".
So, maybe most people will stay on Reddit for now, and probably I will have to leave behind certain communities instead of finding direct replacements. But I see that as a good thing. As long as even just 2% of Reddit's users make it here, I'm excited it will grow into something much better than what I left behind.
Yeah. Something something ... The company we keep.
It shouldn't matter if Reddit has a larger user base, etc. As long as the quality is high here, I'm happy.
Lemmy's been a. Breath of fresh air for me. Feels a lot like Reddit in the ol' days and prefer it over Reddit.
If that means we have a lower user count than Reddit ...... Sure. As long as y'all here with me, we have made Lemmy successful.
Need to be take SimWeb data with a bit of a grain of salt. Having used in previous businesses their results are indicative. They smooth big m2m changes from memory.
To add, from memory this won't include app traffic and will only be Web and msites.
Lemmy user count for the same time period:
That was a lot more than I expected
Nice charts 😁
Beauty. I'm having such a good time over here.
Won't be going back to Reddit. That's for sure.
Remember about the Pareto principle: roughly 20% of users is probably responsible for the 80% of the content. This 3% is quite a lot in this context, especially considering the active people are probably much less complacent in this regard.
The 90-9-1 principle may also be relevant here: 90% are lurkers, 9% are contributors, and 1% are creators.
And how much % are bots, tho? I know that prior to and during the 3rd party API announcement I got so many requests from OF promoter bots that I suspect that Reddit will be the epitome of the Dead Internet theory
Are you saying the closure of many of the subs from June 12-14 and beyond had a negative impact on website traffic?
Yep. They went from 1.7B visits to 1.7B visits
Oh no!
They can't afford more decimal digits; it's a free report.
That was me and all my alt accounts. The real numbers will be next month.
This! 😁
Now that Reddit made the decision to move it's NSFW content behind it's app, this decline will 3x in speed.
Can confirm. I left coz of that.
I didn't think I would cut it completely, but once Sync died I tried to use the browser and it just forces that app on you. The app is unusable and very unenjoyable. Cold Turkey it is.
I imagined the numbers would be a touch higher but 3% feels shruggable.
I think the real question that these numbers don't tell you though is the quality of the content. When I have popped on just out in f curiosity and not logged in, the new 'front page of the internet' appears to be whitepeople twitter and memes. Doesn't look inviting enough for me to log in at all.
In June 3rd party apps still worked, the July numbers are what's really going to show the damage done.
Yeah I stopped going on Reddit when RIF stopped working.
Julys numbers will be down more I assume.
We gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers.
Is this common for this time of year? I know I’m online less in the summer. Reddit is going/has gone to hell, but it seems like there are other factors here
I spend a ton more time doomscrolling during summer holidays, so I'd say this is anecdotal 💁♂️
Just found out about Lemmy for the first time, joined, and am loving the layout/website/app so far. Probably going to switch over to just this over time.
How long were you on Reddit? The lemmy desktop site is very similar to the old Reddit layout!
Welp, it looks like 12 years on Reddit. Certainly happy to be here. On both now for the time being. We'll see how things progress with Reddit. Certainly planning on sticking around here.
I'd be more interested in next month's stats
All the media standing on the protests actually probably drive traffic to Reddit
SimilarWeb needs to invest a little in their presentation skills. A bar graph with no difference in the bar heights is not very interesting. And are they aware you can use more places after the decimal point? "1.7B" above each bar doesn't help at all.
Not all data is beautiful, I suppose
Does this account for traffic generated through official/unofficial apps?
Looks like no, it's desktop only:
reddit.com's traffic has decreased by 3.36% compared to last month (Desktop).
Interesting to note that if you scroll down further you'll see that the #1 content referral to reddit is adult content at 20.6%, with second place being video games at 16.3%. A solid one fifth of the other sites pointing at reddit do so for porn, basically.
I don't think that SimilarWeb includes app traffic in their estimates; they seem to focus on web traffic only. App traffic would be interesting to track, though.
This could get very, very complicated. A lot of mobile apps are nothing more than a slightly customized mobile web browser, complete with web bugs. Others are native code with raw API/etc calls. Some are a mixture. And all of that kinda misses the point of the data that people want when they see these reports.
July is the real indicator with API being turned off on June 30th. I don't think the protests themselves had a big enough drop off, but I have to assume a lot of folks have either left or use only desktop currently once that happened.
The API hasn't been "turned off", there is still a free tier (very limited) and a paid tier (very expensive), plus some 3rd party apps have been spared and are still working.
To be honest, it looks like their attempt at monetizing the API wasn't even turned on yet. They just blocked certain API keys from being able to use oauth. Which is what broke RedReader despite it supposed to be spared for blind people.
All third party apps are still working, you just can't log in. Apps who decided to charge a monthly fee still have no pricing from reddit and are still operating for free until reddit figures out wtf they are doing, or at least that's what I've gathered based on the announcements from those apps.
NSFW content was supposed to be removed from the API yesterday but still nothing 🤷♀️
July will be more interesting to see since the third party apps didn’t die until June 30th.
If it remains a one-off, it won't make much of a difference. If it becomes a trend, spez is toast.
97% of the traffic but a shit load more data to monetize on each user is a win for reddit.
... except if it's the beginning of the trend, and specially if that 3% is from the people that actually contribute meaningful content to reddit. You could be seeing +15% less traffic by end of the year, then it's a problem and a loss
This should continue as search results begin dropping Reddit search results as searchers land on a deleted topic, back out and go elsewhere. The engines track all that. Reddit will be seeing a big drop in trust metrics for a while.
Does it include clicking onto the site through a google search for troubleshooting or something? Or is it registered users? Because I would count as using reddit in that case, even though it was through an Adblock and I didn’t click any further.
reddit counts it even if youre not logged in as a user, so yes google click-throughs unfortunately count.
If you want to avoid counting towards reddit's traffic, take a look at LibReddit / LibRedirect
https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit
https://libredirect.github.io
So they also lost ranking (I assume to discord that moved up in to 4th place)
It's an exciting development! I have been looking forward to having such an overview available. It will be interesting to follow the progress—I see great potential in Lemmy, but it requires a larger user base to make a significant impact (in my opinion).
So, let's hope that the traffic jumps over here instead - and that they bring along the good posts 🤞🏻
Let's keep the momentum. I find Reddit overwhelming.
The more I'm learning about Lenny's markdown the more I forget about what's her face
That's a disappointingly low number. I was honestly fully expecting closer to 30% drop.
I think I would be surprised if it is in the double digits. With that said, I wouldn't expect it to have been in full force in June. Many people kept using it until the apps ran out. But I do think the people that really care is a relatively small group.
What I would love to be able to see is:
-The change in numbers for the official reddit app
-The change in traffic through July
-The change in content creation through July
I honestly expect the numbers to be 5-10% but I doubt we'll ever get reliable numbers for most of it.
True, and you're absolutely right. As much as we'd love it, Reddit would gain nothing for telling us how much damage we caused, and we're likely never to see the numbers to prove it. I was fairly optimistic with 30%, that's more a wish/dream rather than reality. I might be satisfied if we see 5-10%.
I have a habit of taking casual glances at other people's phones (don't @ me), and I can tell you I can count the times I've seen someone use an alternative Reddit app on one hand, where as the official Reddit app is semi prevalent.
It's really just us nerds that make the move to somewhere else, casual users would never have bothered.
I think it will be a long time until you can find casual lifestyle advice on Lemmy, if ever. Most people have a hard time grasping what the fediverse is, why it's supposed to be good and figuring out how to follow people on mastodon. We'll stay niche for a while
I think it'll take time but as things settle a bit I wouldn't be shocked to see a lot of uses spring up that draw in users without them really being aware they're even using the fediverse.
For example one of the main draws to Reddit was always the tech knowledge of the users but us nerds are all here now so it's only a matter of time before Twitter and Facebook have screenshots of Lemmy posts rather than Reddit posts, all the rabbit holes that used to lead to Reddit will start pointing here.
There are already interesting bots being written for communities here, I saw a chat GPT one and no doubt anyone making a fun toy is far more likely to design it to work here where it's not going to have API access destroyed and everything is more flexible - I know that next bot I write will be for lemmy rather then Reddit which I'd normally use. I might even get round to writing the community RPG game that was going to work on its own subreddit, I could have it as a custom instance instead and allow members of federated communities to play.
There's so many more possibilities and as they evolve they'll slowly draw people over and when they have their toe in I suspect meny will stay. I've got a hundred ideas for things to make and with ai coding helping I'll probably actually get round to finishing a dozen of them before the end of the year - I went to try new ways of visualising discussions, of working together and against each other to reach a common goal, I want to make games and mobile apps that work with communities in interesting ways and this is the perfect platform to do it on so I know I don't be the only one
I think that's wildly optimistic that it would be that high. Most of reddit is lurkers and a large number of people who are using 3rd party apps were still using it anyways.
I have just visited reddit for the first time in quite a while , the picture imo is pretty grim for reddit. Dead subs , little actual life , and when you log out the front page is dire. I think that actual content is key here and that is where the crisis for reddit is shown clearly. Talk of the protest not working is just that,talk , in reality reddit has been deeply effected imo
Huh. I'm surprised it's around the same as Facebook. Two additional facts I'd like to know about the other social networks in order to make a comparison:
- App/mobile usage (this link only covers desktop)
- Bounce rate +/- for month to compare with Reddit
Let’s keep that trend going
I'm glad to see there are viable alternatives. When the niche subs move, it's game over for reddit.
Compared to the other platforms it seems really insignificant, tbh.
Am I not reading the numbers right or Reddit lost the most traffic of them? I wouldn't exactly call it insignificant (although it's not that much either)
Some 3rd party apps still work, and I currently mainly use Sync for Reddit (patched through ReVanced) while transitioning to Lemmy. I begin to like Lemmy more, but I lack some communities that exist on Reddit. Hopefully, it's just a matter of time until Lemmy will have all of the Subreddits.
The real data point will come in a few months/years. On every social media platform, a small percentage of users drive the majority of content. On Twitter, for example, 25% of the users create 75% of the tweets. So estimating the effect of Redditgate by traffic is a poor metric (at best a trailing metric). Lots of lurkers (which is the vast majority of users) will still drive traffic until the content becomes worse. And for the many users and moderators of Reddit which were creating and curating nearly all the content, I've got to believe a significant percentage are irretrievably angered by their FREE efforts being dismissed by u/spez and have left. Just losing the efforts of the bot subreddit over the next few months will flood Reddit with exponentially increasing shitposts.
I think many are coming to Lemmy just based upon my anecdotal observation that the quality of posts on Lemmy has increased dramatically in the last 3 weeks.
Good, let it die. Then stop talking about it entirely, mk?
I don't want it to die. I want it to be a place the degens, power mods and other radical screeching lunatics can hang out.
Fair enough! Condé Nast owns it so it won’t truly die, just dwindle until they realize it’s not worth paying for.
If you're not interested in hearing about it anymore, be sure to block the [email protected] community and similar.
For real though, let's stop talking about reddit here.
Maybe stop visiting a community called reddit???
Could always promote Lemmy there
Lol that’s like saying there’s too much porn on /r/gonewild
You have 3 topic choices: Reddit, Meta, or BEANS
I do like Beans....
"This is a community for all news and discussions about Reddit." Read the sidebar next time.
Just like Mastodon, the discussion of the other sites will fall in a few weeks as better content replaces it.
I mean, most people left Reddit for this place with a considerable resentment towards the former, schadenfreude-inducing posts are to be expected (especially, well, on !reddit)
It's a hot topic, give it a week and folks will want to discuss something else.
It's a hot topic and is probably gonna be so for awhile longer until the dust settles
Maybe its artificially held up to cover it up
It just so happens after I left Reddit I went on tiktok a little more to check it out. And a few communities moved to discord.
Interesting…
Watching this overall situation in regards to social media develop is fascinating.
So nothing moving in any direction really... Just goes to show the average person really doesn't care, they just want to get back to their addiction
That's really not a lot considering the amount of crying everyone was doing. I've just had a look from my PC and it's no different to how it was before pulling the API plug. People quickly fold it seems.
Not enough to break the ranks of Mordor.
They’ll survive and keep going. They’re mainstream now. Total ass, but most people don’t care.
Good
More. MORE!!!