Does anyone know how many people have left Reddit?
Does anyone know how many people have left Reddit?
I’ve tried looking online but I’m not savvy enough to find a good answer. I haven’t been on Reddit since June 30, and am interested in seeing the number of people who have migrated. I know the Reddit user base is huge, so idk if it has been enough to hurt the site. Fuck spez.
The Threadiverse (Lemmy & kbin) had less than 10k active users before June. Now there's more than 126k active users. It doesn't mean that they all left Reddit, but at least that they are active here since Reddit fucked things up.
109That’s good to see. I know the first few days that I used Lemmy my feeds were pretty sparse. Now I can endlessly scroll though new content. I hope the growth continues.
41And now that there is enough to infinite-scroll, that's enough to satisfy any one user. Of course, it's true that having more content will allow for a larger number of high quality posts and the ability to serve more niche communities, but at least there is a viable alternative for that Reddit itch now. It's so much easier to uninstall Reddit apps than it was a month ago.
4
What sucks is that’s barely a dent in their numbers.
12Reddit is among the most popular social media worldwide, with an estimated 55.79 million daily active users and 1.660 billion monthly active users in 2023.
Yeah, a drop in the bucket. Even considering lurkers and bots.
But that's okay. The goal is to have a nice, active enough community outside of reddit. Reddit can keep on existing. I would argue not having everyone move here, or somewhere else, is good to keep the interaction healthy. Let alone the software and servers that couldn't handle it.
32Reddit is stupid but do we really want to be as big as Reddit? The quality has tanked in the past several years in large part because of how big it is. I think we’re on a good trajectory. Looking at it as a zero sum game where Reddit has to fail for this to be successful will only leave you disappointed. Reddit doesn’t need to fail for Lemmy to be good.
10
A good chunk of those could've made accounts but not stayed long. And how do they get those numbers? Because there were many people who did accounts in more than one instance.
5Those are active users. The numbers are from fedidb, updated hourly. They are counting posts and comments as activity.
8
It is unlikely that even reddit themselves are able to conclusively answer this, as the protests made many people leave and many other people come or come back.
The userbase "churned" a great deal, which serves to obscure the specifics.
To add to this, if I were spez, and I was bleeding users rapidly, I would be willing to employ bots to inflate my numbers. I sincerely doubt spez is more ethical than I am, and it takes no genius to come up with this idea.
52Reddit has been full of bits for at least a year
11It most definitely has. Bots too. (sorry, couldn't help myself...)
11
As one of those, I can't even really answer it.
I used to spend hours a day on the site, mostly on my phone. Now I'm blocked from accessing it on my phone at all. I've stopped doom scrolling reddit altogether.
But I still get linked to Reddit often, from both friends and google searches. And there are one or two specific threads that I'm sure to check.
I've basically cut down from 15+ hours a week of Reddit to less than one. So have I quit Reddit or not?
8I’m similar to you, and would say I’ve quit. It’s the same with Facebook and Twitter. Occasionally someone will send me something from there or there’ll be something I can’t find anywhere else, but I don’t stick around to browse afterwards.
2
There's also people like me who are no longer active but didn't nuke their accounts. It'd be pretty hard to track.
8Since the protests began, one of the subreddits I used to frequent now has an abnormally high number of comments; this might explain why.
6
Lemmy posts used to get like 30 upvotes max. I remember a few years ago one of the Lemmy devs made a post talking about the future of Lemmy and it got 120 upvotes over the course of a month.
Seeing posts of beans get 1/10th the upvotes as the front page of /r/All without the bots makes me wonder if Lemmy actually took a bite sized chunk out of Reddit, and they did it with chump change servers too
34Well there's no question more people were on the threadiverse on the 1st July onwards. My little corner of the threadiverse was getting around 3x or more the normal server to server messages. The bigger instances of lemmy and kbin were struggling under the pressure.
And since then it's been busy compared to before (I think at least). But that doesn't mean people aren't doing both.
5plus all the dope apps being built. Lemmy feels a lot bigger than reddit too.
Also ur username brought back some memories, hah.
4
This isn’t easy to answer for a lot of reasons. People “leave Reddit” in a lot of ways. Some deleted their account. Some nuked all their comments but left the account up. Some just deleted the app. Some stopped using Reddit but will eventually return. Some JOINED Reddit specifically to watch the exodus drama. Some made bot accounts to fuck with the numbers for fun. And of course, some users joined without ever being aware there was drama at all. Looking at the change in the number of users alone won’t yield the answers.
Other useful metrics would be number of posts/comments contributed, and daily active user statistics. But again, engagement may have actually been driven upwards recently because drama is fun to be a part of and redditors are notorious keyboard warriors.
Growth of lemmy and other similar platforms is another metric to use, but that number is affected by the converse of all of the reasons I listed above as well: A lemmy account doesn’t mean they deleted Reddit. It doesn’t mean they’ll stay off it. Not to mention lemmy’s growth is likely inflated by people signing up for multiple instances due to slowdown.
tl;dr: No one is gonna have a good answer to this yet. If they say they do, it’s likely gonna be a pretty inaccurate estimate.
27Most reasoned answer.
I think the interesting thing to see will be how many people, like me, who used to post OC (mostly projects I've worked on, discussion topics, and what I thought were interesting articles) have stopped. I used to go into posts asking for help in areas I was knowledgeable, and provide assistance to newbies in the various hobby subreddits I subscribed to. None of that is happening anymore. I'm getting my memery from Lemmy and my discussion from Tildes now. Absolutely no reason to go to or interact with reddit at all.
1
Probably monthly active uses would be the best gauge. It's somewhat over 50k for Lemmy compared to around a half billion for reddit. That would be .01% or one ten thousandth. So even if all those were the result of people leaving Reddit, a graph on paper would not have high enough resolution to register a difference.
In any case it only matters that Lemmy has a big enough user base to make it worthwhile. I'd be more concerned about it getting too big that being too small.
23Think about the quality of user reddit lost as well.
6The growth here is all that really matters. Anything else is irrelevant. People should focus more on the success of this community rather than the failure of another. If your mad at reddit and truly think others can do better elsewhere. Here is elsewhere let's make it better.
5
20No people left reddit, only us bots.
15Kinda been feeling lately (since even before the recent events, to be honest) like that sentence should read "no people left on Reddit, only us bots."
7
There are dozens of us.
Dozens.
15That seems high. Definitely tens of us.
7
Hard to say, because I recall reading that traffic after the protest pretty much returned back to normal levels.
Even if people were unhappy, they went back. Its a tough addiction to fight I guess?
On the other hand, the protest was mostly by the moderators. Not necessarily the users. A bunch of people didnt really even realize what was going on or why? Personally, I didnt care what the moderators were doing. A bunch of those guys were always power tripping anyway. I personally was just done with reddit.
5Maybe 1/2%
4about tri-fiddy
1Looking at monthly stats (which is most of what you can see for free) there's no impact yet:
https://app.neilpatel.com/en/traffic_analyzer/overview?lang=en&locId=2840&domain=reddit.com
1The first link requires a paid subscription to see historic data and the second link only has visitor data up to May.
4When I just looked, similarweb had the data for June and they showed a drop in visits of 3.36% and a drop in rank. So something happened - but not much. And that may only reflect the temporary blackout in some subs.
2
Not sure about anyone else, but I left for good (deleted the Reddit app from my phone).
I'm not a mod, never had my own subreddit, posted/commented very infrequently and used the official Reddit app. The reason I left is because the company is ran by idiots who do things against their users' best interest. I for one am not going to be a sheep in their herd.
Even if not many people left Reddit, I believe this whole fiasco planted the seed for the future. Next time people are unhappy with Reddit there will be an active alternative that they can migrate to.
1