- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
Thank you for understanding basic statistics and data analysis (some people here do not). It’s all about the trends shown by the data, rather than the raw numbers.
There’s also the rapid influx of bots, since admins were using GPT bots to astroturf on their behalf.
More importantly, traffic is a trailing indicator. The protests and anger were from content creators and moderators. As they leave, the quality on Reddit will decrease significantly but that will take months/years. And the traffic will decrease but will follow the drop in quality content and moderation. Based upon the increased quality of posts on lemmy just in the last 3 weeks, many of the content creators have moved to the fediverse.
This is for June. Third party apps were still working, and personally I didn’t change my Reddit browsing habit much during June. Now that third party apps are officially dead, I’ve been on Reddit a lot less, and been spending more time on Lemmy. Curious to see what the numbers look like for July.
Lemmy needs !RemindMe
Similar Web has no idea of traffic over third party apps to start with. So it wouldn’t even notice a difference at July 1st.
A large number of people joined Lemmy before July. The user based for Lemmy jumped by 1600% if I remember right before July 1st
A 1600% increase in Lemmy could still be the result of a 3% drop in Reddit. There’s a massive difference in scale between the two sites.
As per the above comment, a single stat rarely paints a complete picture.
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.
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
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.
Removed by mod
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.
I was also an enthusiastic Apollo user.
Other than Lenny, do you replace Reddit with anything else? This thread we’re in now is an exception - there are a lot of posts here. But most threads on Lemmy are pretty empty.
Thats why its up to all of us to start participating.
Protip: If you really want to start a conversation/get engagement, follow Cunningham’s Law:
the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.
So, fill those empty posts with confidently incorrect statements and watch that comment section fill up as people rush in to correct you.
Actually, Cunningham’s Law says nothing of the sort. If you look at the source material as I have done - and in the original Phoenician, because so much is lost in translation otherwise - you’ll quickly note that Cunningham is really attempting to convey the hopeless sense of man’s search for purpose in a cruel, unforgiving world. While some scholars debate the literal truth to this sentiment as expressed by the author, it is generally thought plausible if not outright likely that these writings followed a catastrophic life event of some sort - the loss of a child or death of a spouse, witnessing the end of a great civilization, a dick pic delivered to the wrong person. While the specifics aren’t known, what we do know about the author is that he would likely be further distraught at the loss of control and ownership experienced with a misattributed “law” on the internet should such a thing even be imaginable.
I like this law
Same
Wefwef all the way now
I downloaded Memmy yesterday, and so far I like it.
Memmy ist really awesome! Intuitive, fast, great looks! Love itt!
And it is officially on the App store now!
It’s absurd just how good wefwef is as a web app. Such a natural transition from Apollo.
Since I’m here, RIP Apollo and thanks for all the hard work Christian!
WefWef on the desktop and Memmy for Lemmy on the phone…
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.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 agree. The real change will be from 1 July onwards since none of us can use our apps anymore.
Eh, reddit could’nt even do that right. They’ve not shutdown all apps
Yea, Infinity is still working
Infinity has Spez’s cock down their throat and is going subscription based.
For whatever it’s worth, I doubt it comes anywhere near their throat.
Good one!
It’ll be interesting to see how many users stick with the apps that are continuing. I think the devs are crazy to think that even more than 5% of the users they had will continue to use the app for $5/month. Especially when you can’t view NSFW content.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers.
Whatup Lemmy gang. Glad to be here.
Want some beans?
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.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
Oh I agree with that! I also want to see fediverse grow.
What I meant was: I don’t want Reddit.
Yeah, Reddit isn’t going anywhere; but we are seemingly getting a viable alternative. Before, there wasn’t really a viable alternative, which is why Reddit was comfortable making the moves it has, I think.
I can say what’s helped me tremendously is finding a niche instance that aligns with your interests instead of the huge generic ones
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.
For sure! I only meant that it felt a little gatekeepy, was not intending to imply that you were. I share your worries.
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.
Exactly… My Boost for Reddit stopped working on the 5th and here I am. 😇
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.
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’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
I’m only hopping on reddit momentarily if I’m looking for specific information. For my casual browsing, I’ve largely transitioned over to here, and I’m enjoying myself immensely.
I’m not surprised it’s a huge drop, but there’s a vindictive part of me that wants the bleeding to continue.
Meh it’ll just be overrun with non original content by people reposting shit from Lemmy
The never ending ouroboros of reposted content :D
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.
Are you me? I’ve been off Reddit like a week now and I’ve already read two books with the extra time I don’t spend doom scrolling.
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.
No they’ll find alternatives too if they don’t like what’s going on. There’s really no need for reddit anymore
For most of them this is just a minor inconvenience compared to the gigantic community they get.
Im sure if reddit keeps this path it will deteriorate and lose users, especially as new generations don’t enter it and prefer other platforms, but it still has a very long way to go.
Even twitter, which is full-on scorched earth with big messes like limited viewership, still retains a large active community.
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…
In that case, maybe we’ll just have to grow a similar community here as well.
