Reddit reveals daily active user count for the first time: 52M | Hacker News Reader

Reddit reveals daily active user count for the first time: 52M

theverge.com

54 pointsfinphil22 comments

I feel like at that number Reddit is in the goldilocks zone for being a useful social media platform -- big enough that there is tons of engagement, but small enough to not drown out anyone. If I want to, I can make a post about a hobby project on Reddit and (if it's actually something interesting) it'll get quite a bit of attention. If I post the same thing on twitter, it'll be lucky to get a tenth of the attention.

I do wonder how much of this is due to the lack of emphasis on a poster's "credentials" though. Reddit seems to be the last online platform where anyone can contribute to a discussion without being judged for how "popular" someone is.

Absolutely not true at all that you'll get attention if it's "interesting". There's tons of people jostling for eyes on their posts in medium-to-large hobby subreddits, oftentimes posting things to multiple ones. Makes it even harder because one can't self-promote their own stuff. Bots/burner astroturfing accounts are also a massive problem on reddit.

I'm just speaking from my own experience, but I guess I've just been lucky. The subreddits I've posted projects to are in the ~20-50K subscriber range and have always responded well to whatever project I'm announcing, unless it was something that clearly didn't take me very long.

Keep in mind the size of the subreddit. A subreddit with a few thousand followers is more likely to see your post than, say, /r/funny’s followers would

Huh. That’s actually smaller than I would have guessed.

Still, the high level number doesn’t capture the strong communities embedded within Reddit, which I think is the real value of the site.

Wow that's.. tiny. I was also surprised to learn that Twitter has just 187M daily users, even smaller than Snap (249M), which in my mind was only an app used by American teenagers.

Twitter is just a bunch of businesses, celebrities, and bots.

I don't know a single normal person that uses it on a daily basis. The fact that is has this many people is amazing to me.

I wonder what an active user is defined as for Twitter.

Tweeted?

Scrolled through their timeline?

Read an embedded tweet on a news site?

Dismissed a mobile notification?

For a platform like Twitter (or Facebook for that matter) it seems relatively easy to game the numbers.

Similar to Reddit or HackerNews, it depends on what communities you're in. You have to go to Twitter if you want to follow journalists, comic artists, or TV writers. I'm sure there's a lot more communities I'm not interested in where Twitter is the primary source of information, like celebrities or K-Pop.

Lots of high-profile actors are on twitter (tech influencers and politicans for 2 more examples) because it's such a direct, relatively clutter free way to get out information and have it seen.

Most politicians are still only technically on Twitter, continuing the Obama-era style of very careful and boring tweets. The only three I can think of that are 100% live tweeting like humans (regardless if they're humans you like) are AOC, Ted Cruz, and of course Trump.

This is much smaller than I suspected.

It seems there is room for competition here.

Many moved off reddit when thedonald subreddit got shutdown and went to other places.

Millions of people?

Definitely not millions, and definitely not people. I’d imagine bots outnumbered real users in that forsaken place of a subreddit.

We should start by asking how many of the daily reddit users are bots vs humans to set a baseline.

do you have any evidence that they aren't people? if so, i'd like to see it. actually, i'd like to see any methods of determining if a reddit user is a bot or not.

It had almost a million subs at it's peak.

The semi-recent crackdown on right wing or in some cases extremely left wing subs has forced many to other platforms.

I would say millions have been pushed off in one way or the other.

Can confirm this didn't just happen to thedonald subreddit, several default subreddits (i.e. country-specific subreddits, apolicital subreddits, etc) became extremely left leaning, banning different opinions, forcing people to leave, essencially.

It would be interesting to see how many and how it influenced the remaining users' satisfaction.

thedonald.win just broke into the top 400 sites in america, so a whole bunch of people.

It sounds about right to me. A quarter of Twitter, and Twitter is well known in the mainstream zeitgeist.

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