Reddit's Traffic is Down 3.36% Month-Over-Month, According to SimilarWeb

I used Apollo right up until it shut down, and I haven’t touched Reddit since. I’m guessing I’m not the only one.

I agree. The real change will be from 1 July onwards since none of us can use our apps anymore.

Even if 3% is a low number, I guarantee that 3% were reddits more active users and content creators.

If most of the quality content slows to a trickle users will continue to leave and look for more viable platforms.

no company wants to say they’ve lost 3% of their customers

Reddit doesn't see users as customers.
They are the product. A number that you can sell to advertisers and shareholders.

How many people are less engaged in the internet at the beginning of summer because they’re on vacation or partying? I would think drops like this as the weather improves are pretty normal.

spaz: were not profitable, heres ways were gonna become more profitable.

redditors: ugh leaves

spaz: your small protest from the landed gentry cant hurt me.

redditors: ok, bye.

spaz: jgvbefgbaegbeQANGBLEw

In history terms, 3% is everything. I remember seeing a documentary where a guy claimed that every coup in history, in which 3% of the population were ardently dedicated to the cause, has been successful.

I am wondering how user count is calculated.

I guarantee you that a huge percentage of Redditors have multiple accounts. Many of which might be inactive. Are all accounts ever created on Reddit still considered part of their current total or are only accounts active in the 6 or 12 months count? If people are legitimately leaving Reddit, I think their losses are going to steamroll because they won't just lose one user, but instead they will lose that one user and their 2 or 3 alternate accounts as well.

Next month or three are going to look like a bloodybath for Reddit.

Can't wait!

Yeah, I was using Lemmy and Reddit in parallel throughout June (aside from the blackout days, where I stayed off of Reddit out of solidarity,) and only really drastically reduced my Reddit usage this month.

Think of how many ‘users’ are bots that likely won’t continue to work since no one would pay the monthly sub to bot Reddit like in the past.

Also, this data isn’t from Reddit. It’s from SimilarWeb. They track browser access to websites, not API calls. Reddit absolutely won’t report their drop in API access, which is where the largest drop will be.

I lurk the frontpage occasionally and I've already noticed the Reddit atmosphere has gotten ... weird.

Little-known, content-churning subreddits are bubbling to the top because of all the other blackouts and desertions. Fringe viewpoints and wacko opinions that would normally get downvoted to the bottom of a thread are now out in the open because there's no voice of reason to hold them back.

And the kind of people that are still on there, acting as if everything is fine (or, God forbid, better(???) than it was before the revolts) ... it's a very strange place now.

9gag... That's a word I haven't seen in a long time.

Reddit will stay, heck Digg if still around. It won't be the same though.

Reddit will spiral down to a 9gag clone.

Back in the day, I discovered Reddit because people in the comments on 9gag would say a certain post was stolen from reddit.

I was a sucker for rage comics, so r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu (aka f7u12) was my gateway drug.

On the other hand, most upvoted posts and comments on redit are far away from best. I expect most of those people will not even notice, they just scroll over reposts and bot.

Even the porn subs are starting to be overrun by onlyfans spammers

I've been waiting for my third party app to break. Boost finally stopped working an hour ago so I signed up here.

The protests aren't all useless, necessarily.

Subs that go NSFW are depriving Reddit of advertising revenue, and sites that change their purpose are likely to drive away some users who don't want to shitpost, who might then go looking for alternatives.

There are soooo many GPT comments and threads on Reddit, at least when I left on the first. I imagine it’s going to get worse and worse now.

Reddit started with nothing but sock puppet accounts created by the devs, so I could definitely see them doing the same thing to show "activity".

Think about all those running power delete suite or similar.

Something to keep in mind to contextualize the interaction statistics: the density of contributors to lurkers in these numbers will be drastically higher here due to the greater barrier to entry as well as the average user type of the migration. It should be expected that the average user in a niche/early-adopter community will be more active.

Lemmy.ca is +1615%

Okay, but 52% of traffic on reddit is coming from Youtube??? Those channels that just compile reddit posts must really be helping Reddit. Lets make some Lemmy reading channels

So from what I can tell the visits to the main lemmy instances are only ~.5% compared to total visits to reddit (1.7 billion vs 9 million). Smaller instances might bump that up to .7% or so. Reddit's 3% drop in visits might be mostly due to people using the site less, while transfers to lemmy account for only a fraction of that. Still cool, though, hopefully we can keep the momentum going over the next couple months.

Where's this data coming from?

It was my primary social media site for over 10 years, and only one in probably the past five after ditching Facebook.

All I ever used to access it was baconreader. When the first talk of killing off the API started with the rate hike, I had a sinking feeling this was the end.

Rode it out till the last day, and reflexively kept opening baconreader just to realise again it was offline.

Decided to give Lemmy a try, and while it took a couple days to get it sorted, I have to say, for my daily browsing fix, it's more than enough.

Yes, reddit is a giant database, and when google searches take me there I'll view the info, but for everyday use, lurking, posting, and commenting, never again.

Not sure of its bias, user saturation, bot, shills, demographic, or what, but while smaller, the quality and content of the comments here just seems better. It reminds me of the early days on fark or even back on IRC.

It really does piss me off that greed over an IPO ruined something that had been a part of my life for so long.

I am enough of a grumpy old bastard that unless they fix the API and baconreader starts up again, I'm done. The internet is a big weird place, and I'm happy to go see other parts of it.

I never realized how significant killing third-party apps would be for me personally, but since Apollo stopped working my desire to use Reddit on my phone has dropped to zero. I've completely replaced it with Discord and "traditional" social media in my downtime.

If they kill old.reddit on desktop too, that will be the final nail in the coffin for me.

I haven't actively browsed Reddit since the blackout. Almost a month, it's flown by and I'm still fine

(Actively meaning I've accidentally clicked a link or two that pointed to it, but I never opened the app myself)

I'm the same.

Admittedly the time away from Reddit has been a boon for me as I've been consistently better at using spare time here and there time to actual hobbies and responsibilities.

I reddit a LOT at work so I was probably spending roughly 3-4 hours a day with reddit at least in the background and I haven't actually intentionally visited the site for two weeks.

Honestly, my mental health is improving. Reddit is a shitty outrage machine that's astroturfed by corporations and fascists.

Did the same thing and deleted my account. My muscle memory can't find the app and my battery last a full day.

If I do a google search where the answer is on reddit

This is what I'm missing the most, because I've learned to automatically add "reddit" to most of my searches, since I usually could find a better discussion there.

But now it's useless - if you need a product recommendation, it's filled with bots obviously schilling for whoever paid, fake reviews, and it's generally useless. And technical questions mostly lead to subreddits that were closed, and I have no idea what state are they in now - but I still don't want to give them traffic.

But what to do now? The internet is basically unusable by now. Everyone and now even AIs are writing blog posts or videos about things they barely understand, you have literaly thousands of AI generated pages about programming questions, some of them are outright wrong, and if you need something more complex than a single command - for example how to write a good video game AI architecture (especially this search term is FUCKED. I need to rewrite steerring, navigation and behaviors for a video game, but good luck searching for "video game AI" in the last few months...), most of the articles or tutorials are pretty shitty.

Every search term is filled with mediocre blog posts, usually copy-pasted between eachother. I literally don't know how to use the internet for deeply researching a topic anymore - everything is just barely scratching the surface in the most popularized way possible.

I guess I just have to start searching on scholar.google.com...

I thought about this comment, and realized that somehow, I just don't care so much anymore. Instead of worrying about what I left behind, I'm looking forward to what's ahead of us.

I think it's because even before the whole 3d-party-app drama, there already was this undefined feeling that Reddit's best days are behind it. Maybe it's the effect of ad money and monetization, or it's the inevitable trend towards low quality content that comes with mass adoption, probably it's both.

Whatever the cause, in most subreddits, the old Facebook-style rot had already set in. Once-cool subs now being an endless barrage of tired memes, bots farming karma, and people being assholes. The things I joined for years ago, the engaging discussion, random encounters with amazing experts, the cutting-edge internet anarchy, it's all already long gone.

When I opened the app (Baconreader in my case), I only did it out of habit, to then spendy time scrolling through an endless list of things that made me slightly go "heh".

So, maybe most people will stay on Reddit for now, and probably I will have to leave behind certain communities instead of finding direct replacements. But I see that as a good thing. As long as even just 2% of Reddit's users make it here, I'm excited it will grow into something much better than what I left behind.

Most people are lurkers though, I'd wager a greater proportion of active posters left.

I think you are being very pessimistic about this. Reddit's collapse will not be a linear process. If it happens mind you.

But if it happens:

• First the most active 3% leaves. But the 3% creates a huge hole in the overall activity of the site. So another 3% leaves. And the site will at an ever increasing speed reach the point of no return. Reddits main user base is the drooling masses who want to read gossip instead of working.

But if there is no free entertainment, the masses just move on. Basically all a platform is, is it's core audience.

I've starting going to Reddit less and less, but if I do, my frontpage has gone to shit. I can't even recognize it, the few instances I visited regularly are read-only and since I've unsubscribed the most popular default ones, there's almost nothing left for me.

Which is good, since thanks to that I'm slowly learning to just automatically starting Lemmy instead of Reddit as my go-to social network.

Honestly, that's fine. Good for Reddit.

It's just not a place for me anymore.

The reddit we fell in love with is gone. Even if the website is still there.

The more I've heard from friends still using it the less desire I have to go back. At first I was gonna boycott until the end of the month but it sounds like it's not even that good now that a lot of active posters left. Haven't felt much urge to go back, although I do need to find new communities for some of the more niche subs I was on. My houseplant and travel hacks discussion has been very lacking since I left Reddit...

There are enough reposts to keep them busy for a while I think. I swear the same post would get reposted a few weeks after the original and get just as many or more upvotes than the first time. And the top comments were usually the same or similar.

I still visit reddit maybe once a day for 10 minutes for niche subs or communities that aren't built up here. If those communities develop here, I will fully cut out reddit.

Edit: also when noting that I use Lemmy amount 90% of the time now, but my overall usage of Lemmy/reddit has gone down. Probably for the better, because I started reading again.

The number of users here is pretty minuscule compared to the Reddit userbase

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.

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.

Traffic is likely not just users, but bots or scripts scraping sites and whatever.

Remember that many people didn't get on Lemmy/Kbin until July 1st. The July stats will be much more indicative of how many people left or cut down their use.

If it wasn’t for my photography, I’d delete instagram

It's funny, but my photography is precisely the reason I'm not on Instagram. Since day 1 I've never thought it is a good place for actual artistic photography; indeed it kinda directly undermined artistic photography back in the day with the "all photos must be square" rule. I've always considered Instagram more of a place to share snapshots. Flickr isn't what it once was, but it's always been more of a true photography-focused social media site.

Just like Etsy. Its a horrible place to try and build a business and be creative and make money, and is being overrun by dropshipped tat, but its where everyone goes to get nice things, so its where people have to sell

I'm in the same boat. Been trying a few different Instagram alternatives for a few years but the user bases are all too small. Pixelfed and Vero seem decent but too much of a ghost town to feel it's worth continuing to post.