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?
I’ll admit that I’m not that updated on recent changes but reddit used to be open about the vote counts being intentionally inaccurate. I believe this at a point started to include scaling the vote count so that the average popular post would have 10-20k or so up votes, even if the actual vote count would be much higher.
So this would make it almost impossible to make any meaningful conclusions from vote count / active users alone.
Yes, they made vote scaling more aggressive after that one Battlefront dev got downvoted into oblivion.
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)
Not surprising. People are saying the same thing about x vs. Bluesky
So it’s the thing with all big social media giants? Why it’s surprising is because with 40-35k mau, lemmy feels like it’s thriving, especially compared to reddit
They won’t show your posts to people even if they follow you. Also they have all the reason in the world to not be good at filtering out bots from their statistics. Also they’ve been playing games with what the metrics are
This makes sense to me if you consider the type of person who is likely to leave reddit is also less likely to be just a passive consumer of content. I imagine in ten years time we’ll have two kinds of “social” media: decentralized activitypub discussion-based networks, and commercial entertainment platforms that might have comments but little else in the way of connecting.
Another stat I like to highlight is the moderator-to-user ratio on Lemmy (and the rest of the Fediverse) is similarly around 10x more improved.
People go to Lemmy because they got banned on Reddit or because their communities fell apart because of reedits bullshit or because they noticed that the feed is completely jacked with bots and disinformation.
In other words, the people going to Lemmy are generally highly active users. Which would probably worry Reddit if they were concerned about actually getting content from their members instead of AI and bots.
One of the weirder information I found. The website seems to have quoted semrush here, so idk, but monthly unique users from America is more than America’s population
You have 3 possible reasons: A) those stats aren’t that accurate; B) “unique” is not that unique (same person counted more than once through the month); and C) it might also include bots. Maybe it’s a mix of the 3.
Semrush is supposed to be not that inaccurate. It’s a data analytics platform. I don’t have the subscription to it to verify this myself, but it’s a huge issue if they are posting inaccurate information.
https://backlinko.com/reddit-users
Here’s where I found this
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…
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.
They could be defrauding investors
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.
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%.
Lemmy has like 40k MAU. Where did you get the 1.2M?
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Yeaa, I misread the information. 1.2m is the total users. Real mau is 40k, 35k specifically for this month
