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
That seems small given the number of Redditors here
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.
And lots of those users probably aren’t real.
But there’s a distribution curve. 10-15% of a user base is super super valuable because they create all the content. If they lost 3-5% of that segment, that would be a real problem.
Yeah, the vast majority of users don’t contribute at all. Not post, not comment, not even upvote. They come only to consume.
Then you get the segment of people who contribute a bit, but not so much, and then you have the golden 1% of powerusers that are active.
That’s why, yes, 3 party app users are just a small chunk off the greater Reddit pie - they are more likely to belong to the segment of Reddit users that actually create content for the side. Posting, commenting, up and downvoting, actively engaging.
The number of users here is pretty minuscule compared to the Reddit userbase
I know more people who are just fine with using the official app than I know people who hate it. It’s kinda sad.
Seems like the backlash was loud but ultimately nowhere strong enough.
Depends on what the goal was. If the goal was to have so many people leave reddit that it dies, then yeah. Nowhere near strong enough for that (and I don’t think that was ever going to happen).
If the goal was to get enough people motivated to make an alternative (like this one or kbin or whatever) viable, then I think it was extremely effective. Prior to June, these spaces didn’t have enough content and discussion to be entertaining for me personally. But I deleted my reddit account on June 30th, and I haven’t once regretted that or gone back to the site because Lemmy has been enough
It was strong enough that Lemmy/kbin now has a large enough userbase to be an active community and to work out the bugs in the software. We’ve got a strong base to grow from now.
People will keep looking for alternatives to Reddit as its own enshittification continues (either by things like eliminating old.reddit or just the degradation of the community) and people who’ve never used a link aggregator/discussion site will continue to sign up. It’s also not just Reddit. With a bit of modification, a version of Lemmy could replace question-and-answer sites like StackOverflow. An embedded version of Lemmy could be used in place of Disqus. Sites that currently maintain their own discussion thread systems could use a Lemmy instance instead.
Any place with threaded discussions now has the option for a federated alternative.
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.
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.
