- cross-posted to:
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- 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
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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
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.
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.
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
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’m sure there are many others disappointed in the lack of discussion - be the person to generate the content, even if it means just stealing what’s interesting from reddit for now.
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
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.
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.
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?
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…
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.
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.
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…
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
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.
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.
Alternatively, people with more time sign up and shitpost. I recall every summer break Redditors would complain. 🫣
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.
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.
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.
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.
For whatever it’s worth, I doubt it comes anywhere near their throat.
Good one!
Yeah, I don’t exactly understand how but RIF is working for me, despite the fact you can’t log into it. I only kept it as a momento, but it still works as long as you have the subs you want to see memorized…
hate to be that guy, but I also want to contribute with content, so: It’s memento
It’s like reddit never left.
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.
We did it Lemmy!
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.
July is what will matter. Most of either dropped or changed browsing habbits after July 1st
I really hope it will be at least another 7% If being this shity to their users ends up with loss barely above the rounding error, it does not bode well for the future.
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.
The thing that really bothers me is that some of the communities I was active in through mobile are pretty much impossible to find outside of reddit.
They’re way small on it, too, so who knows if they’ll even migrate or just fade away.
This here is really my only concern. I followed a good number of subs that existed for actual discussion, not just meme dumps, and unless they’re migrated to Lemmy, I will be missing them.
Sure, I can access Reddit just for those topics, but so far I’m staying away from that site completely in my own self-protest.
( I know, I know, I’m a literal molecule in a drop in a bucket, but damnit, I’m doing my part! :) )Be the change you want to see in the world. If those communities haven’t come over, start them. Seed them.
I think that’s going to be my plan, if I can talk to some of the current mods and ask them to do so here as well. I’ll create the new communities, but have no interest or time for actually moderating them.
I’ve tried browsing with the app but the content I’m being fed seems to have different priorities to rif. The niche stuff that I really want to read appears to be being buried.
It’s made it so much easier to just not give them any content myself as I decided to stop posting there.
I’m really looking forward to seeing where lemmy goes as it’s attracting the kind of people I enjoy associating with. Reddit is headed in the opposite direction IMO.
I feel like I was noticing this on the main site as well. I’d be surprised if they hadn’t been changing the algorithms to spoon feed us specific content, but there’s also a very high likelihood that the overall feel of the content has changed after swaths of people migrated out, and then I’m sure I have a bias against Reddit now as well :P
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.
Then does it really matter, if the only ones left are those looking for and churning out low-quality content? Even if they’re the majority, who cares?
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.
DoorDash everywhere. That’s when I left.
Why the fuck is that sub so active!? Who gives that much of a shit about doordash?? I’ve never seen a Justeat/Deliveroo app. It’s so strange.
Right?? One of the more baffling outcomes of the protest. I think mindless scrollers are desperate for dopamine and will upvote literally any garbage at this point.
My only takeaway from that sub is to continue to never ever use food delivery apps, you’re making your delivery people miserable by using them.
My frontpage was mildly frustrating before ads. I won’t browse reddit with ads and their terrible app
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.
Honestly, that’s fine. Good for Reddit.
It’s just not a place for me anymore.
deleted by creator
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…
My SO also gets a lot of great travel and cooking tips from Tik Tok. She only recently made her reddit account lol. But that is for a medical forum, so also one that I dont expect to transition. Luckily for me, almost everything I used to follow was techy in some way, so I’m not bothered by the difference in content over here.
In that case, maybe we’ll just have to grow a similar community here as well.
