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?
With Lemmy/Piefed being much smaller, I comment a lot more than I would on reddit since I know my voice will likely be heard. Outside of niche subreddits, posting a comment was like yelling into the void. It sort of all came down to how early you made it into a thread on whether anyone would actually see what you said
I think thread/forum-like platforms do a lot better at a small to medium sized community size
I commented more on reddit because I liked the void, knowing I wasn’t likely to get a response alleviated anxiety and just let me spam (til I had to swap to an alt and comment somewhere I was banned accidentally, the void betrayed me)