So I just simply compared the top posts of lemmy r/all and reddits r/all. Currently this month’s top 5 r/all posts are somewhere between 228k - 142k upvotes, while lemmy’s are between 2.2k and 1.7k.

The monthly active user count of reddit is over a billion, while that of lemmy is 1.2 million(edit: no it’s 40k. It’s looking even worse for reddit). If we just compare them by these metrics, reddit has 1000x the users but 100x engagement. And this also held true when I compared the meme subreddits using the same metric, but news subreddit was an outlier where the subscriber to upvote ratio was equal between them.

It’s extremely crude calculation, but since I observed this pattern, I felt I need to share this somewhere. What I feel is that as social media platform gets larger, the number of lurkers, people who don’t engage, increase. could there be any other reason?

  • foodandart@lemmy.zip
    9·
    23 hours ago

    Bots? Chances are a lot of the traffic on Reddit that is of lurkers is just bots being used to gin the number of “unique” visitors each day. Actually, now that I think on it and reflect how Reddit went decidedly sideways when the IPO dropped, it’s got to be bots…

    • cinoreus@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      23 hours ago

      Yeah, but bots does not sound right. That would mean 90% of reddits monthly active users don’t even exist. 50% is a more pallatable number, even close to 60 would have been okay.

      Why I am finding it hard to digest is because reddit already is suffering from a bot problem that’s visible. Like even the engagements are sometimes artificial, especially the political ones. So if you say 90% of reddit mau is bots based on this, then the number would be closer to 95.

      • zabadoh@ani.social
        5·
        22 hours ago

        It could be bots. Have you noticed google searches inserting “reddit (search term)” in your search suggestions?

        Google’s crawlbots alone are constantly scanning your answers in reddit to feed their algorithm.

        That’s just one search company, not including search rivals like MS/Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.

        Also AI bastards crawling all over reddit to feed their training databases.

        • cinoreus@lemmy.worldOP
          2·
          22 hours ago

          When you put it that way, bots sound like a reasonable answer. But would crawlbots actually prop up monthly active users that much? I thought it might be like 10%.