List of virtual communities with more than 1 million users | Hacker News Reader

List of virtual communities with more than 1 million users

en.wikipedia.org

68 pointslainon24 comments

Be careful comparing the "Registered Users" metric on the page between sites. In some cases they're using total number of registered accounts on the forum, and in others they're using metrics that involve recent activity, like a "Monthly Active" metric.

Also, don't trust the numbers, even if they're cited. The current value for Twitter (500 million) is cited as being from an article in 2011 that mentioned 200 million. The Twitter company page - https://about.twitter.com/company - says the current official monthly actives is 313 million.

100% agree, I remember posting on a LinkedIn forum with more than 1 million members and there was no a single click on the link... Lot of LinkedIn groups are ghost towns.

On the other hand I had found more answers about topics in specific subreddits with less users than in StackOverflow/StackExchange sites.

Yes. StudiVZ is listed with 17 Mio registrations but it is virtually dead. People used it for the first 1 or 2 years when it was popular and then everybody moved to Facebook.

> for the first 1 or 2 years when it was popular

Context: It was immensely popular when I just entered university, which was in 2006.

Wow, that list is waaaay shorter than I expected it would be. Kind of shocking to me that there aren't more "virtual communities" over a million users.

While interesting, I don't think you can expect that list to be comprehensive or kept up to date. For example, Facebook (as of this writing) has 1.79B monthly active users[1], well over the 1B listed on that page. I also assume Yelp (not listed) has over 1M active users.

[1] http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/

They are being too restrictive on what they define as a virtual community. For instance the forums in city-data.com has more than a million members. Same with bodybuilding.com

I don't see any restrictions in the article. You can edit it and add your info with a reference.

Tumblr isn't even there as of now.

Keep in mind that having a million users on your site doesn't warrant it even meeting Wikipedia's notability threshold on its own.

You need to add "... Mentioned on Wikipedia" to the submitted title.

[Source: I used to work on one of the sites on this list, and its article went through AfD several times and it barely made it each time. It was never the number of users that saved it. Also it shows how stale this list is, because it shouldn't still be on there.]

4chan? It is not there.

I doubt 4chan has any "registered members" at all.

Shorter list but at some point will be more comprehensive and source for linked article https://query.wikidata.org/#SELECT%20DISTINCT%20%3Fsite%20%3...

Hyves used to be the thing you had as a schoolkid. It had support for showing your relation to somebody (through people in your friendlist), gifs, almost fully customisable pages, a whole set of emoticons and other things.

When Facebook came around, most people left (mostly kids) because of parents getting on the platform. There's a video of a lonely woman that had contact with friends through Hyves, and said "But how am i supposed to send my friends animated pictures now :("

Not sure if tis list is worth something. Like, are you saying 4chan has less than 1 million users? Well, I don't know.

Even if it's "registered users" I'm not sure if I can believe it.

Odd that wikipedia itself isn't in the list

The list is about registered users. According to Wikimedia, the number of active registered Wikimedia editors for all Wikipedia projects in February 2009 was ~85,000. (https://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/) In a more recent count (and more tightly controlled against double counts) for October 2016, that number seems to be ~65,000. (https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm#activit...) Note also that activity can fluctuate based on month so that also explains the decreased number. (during the summer more students will contribute)

Blackplanet is surprising for me. I don't know how active those 20mil are, but that's a very good percentage from the total percentage of blacks in America.

Does anyone know more about the site or is an active member?

See page 93 of http://www.journalism.org/files/2015/04/FINAL-STATE-OF-THE-N...

Says 390,000 unique visitors for January 2015, according to ComScore. For comparison, DeviantArt has roughly the same number of "registered users", but gets about 6,000,000 uniques/month.

I suppose "registered users" is close to useless as a measure, because some may be automated spam accounts, some forums clean up dead accounts / others don't, etc.

This is badly outdated. For example iWiW have been closed years ago.

Facebook (et al) is not a community; it is a platform that hosts communities. It's probably more analogous to a country or religion than a community.

What would you have called it a few years ago before the pages concept started and it was just pages of people? A community?

a place for communities to form.

Take the stats with a grain of salt. For example, MyHeritage (which is on the list) has owned Geni (also on the list) for some time now.

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