SimilarWeb has just released traffic estimates for June. According to these estimates, Reddit’s traffic has seen a 3.36% month-over-month decrease.
For comparison, here’s how traffic has changed for other popular social networking websites:
- Discord.com: +0.51%
- Twitter.com: -1.65%
- Instagram.com: -1.35%
- Facebook.com: -3.18%
- TikTok.com: +0.77%
- Pinterest.com: -2.27%
- Youtube.com: -2.02%
Source: https://www.similarweb.com/website/reddit.com/#overview
To be fair, 3% of traffic missing is not going to be their downfall. They managed to rid themselves of virtually all third party clients in one swoop and had to trade in only a fraction of their monthly engagement - they’ll sell it as streamlining.
It might go either way but it’s a good start. A loss is still a loss and those lost users will find new homes, hopefully in the fediverse. Even if it doesn’t cause an outright bankruptcy, anything to help promote a freer internet is good in my book.
Probably not, but they were still the users that cared enough about the platform to actually spend money on an app just to use it. I have to imagine that the amount of quality posts and comments will decline.
It’s difficult to measure just how impactful that’ll be over the next few months or years.
That’s only for June though. I’m going to wait for the august report to see the drop include the massive exodus that came July 1st. I know I hopped over here then, and all of the posts for like 3 days were people who left in June, or about the exodus with comment sections full of newcomers.
My last visit to reddit was around 7:30PM on June 30th or whenever it was that sync was disabled. I finished writing a lengthy comment to /r/amithegrasshole only for it to not go through. That was disappointing and will be the reminder of what reddit gave to me after years of impulse browsing.
We’ll see how it turns out if all the power users and OC content creators jumped ship, and the platform devolves into a bot-run recycle bin of old memes and content.
Plus if they don’t get better moderator tools for people the quality of subs will diminish
I think that it’s worth it to note that even though only 3% left, we’re a big part of fleshing out a new and improving competing website. Lemmy may not have seemed appealing a few months ago, but holy shit, its taken off in the last month. It’ll be really interesting to see how we grow over the next year as we consistently keep leaching people from reddit.