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Reddit Reveals Daily Active User Count For the First Time: 52 Million (theverge.com) 78

Posted by BeauHD from the small-in-comparison dept.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Reddit says it now has 52 million daily users, with daily usage growing 44 percent year over year for October. The Verge reports: The number is small compared to other social media rivals, though. Twitter has 187 million daily users, Snap has 249 million, and Facebook has 1.82 billion. But at their larger sizes, none of those services are seeing daily usage grow as rapidly as Reddit. In their most recent quarters, Twitter reported 29 percent year-over-year growth, Snap reported 18 percent, and Facebook reported 12 percent.

Daily usage of Reddit is being shared for the first time "as a more accurate reflection of our user growth and to be more in-line with industry reporting," the company told the Journal. (It is true that social media companies tend to use daily users as their preferred metric; though Twitter, for instance, only switched away from reporting monthly users because that number was dipping, while daily users was growing.) The other reason for the change was to focus on a number that would better help to grow Reddit's advertising business. Reddit has focused on monthly usage in the past. This time last year, the company said it had 430 million monthly users, with 30 percent year-over-year growth.
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Reddit Reveals Daily Active User Count For the First Time: 52 Million More

Reddit Reveals Daily Active User Count For the First Time: 52 Million

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  • And they are all dwarfed by the number of /. users (Score:3)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @09:21PM (#60784362)
    More Americans get their news from /. than any other nationality.

  • I wonder (Score:5, Insightful)

    by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @09:35PM (#60784398)
    if a sale or ipo is in the works.
  • May Aaron bury Zuckerberg's portal of attack surfaces. May the publishers of academic journals know the evisceration of Scientology.

    In truth, all righteousness advocacy of the kind I just expressed makes me a little uneasy because meaningful thresholds of competing principles do exist and are annihilated by a binary reduction...BUT

  • Reddit is...not. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RamenMan ( 7301402 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @09:59PM (#60784446)
    About 6 months ago I finally swore off Reddit after about 10 years of heavy use. I was an addict pretty much. Eventually I got so frustrated I had to leave completely (Okay, honestly, my email was banned, but whatever- I can create a new account in about 10 seconds, not like I hadn't done that 137 other times before). But I digress- I quit going about 6 months ago.

    Slashdot is the only 'social media' I allow myself.

    Even with the absolute bozos here on Slashdot, I prefer this to Reddit 100 times.

    Slashdot recognizes that people are different, and should have different opinions. Of course everyone believes it is the OTHER guy being the idiot, but still, there is a bit more understanding of different ways of thinking.

    Reddit is a collection of group-think hives. It's a lot of pressure to get everyone to think the same way. And it's pretty immature at that.

    I think I finally just aged out of Reddit. And I'm better for it.

    (And this comment reads like a crappy reddit post. whatever.)

    Reddit is a collection of group-think hives. It's a lot of pressure to get everyone to think the same way. And it's pretty immature at that.

    I think I finally just aged out of Reddit. And I'm better for it.

    (And this comment reads like a crappy reddit post. whatever.)

    • Re:Reddit is...not. (Score:5, Funny)

      by RamenMan ( 7301402 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @10:01PM (#60784452)
      I'm not a bot, but somehow I post like one.
    • "I think I finally just aged out of Reddit." - Congrats. Pretty soon, you can start high school and then life will be much more interesting.

    • About 6 months ago I finally swore off Reddit after about 10 years of heavy use. I was an addict pretty much. Eventually I got so frustrated I had to leave completely (Okay, honestly, my email was banned, but whatever- I can create a new account in about 10 seconds, not like I hadn't done that 137 other times before). But I digress- I quit going about 6 months ago.

      I'm curious as to why you believe you were being banned and what you think previously drove you to go back even though you had to use a different email to avoid the ban?
      Feel free to reply anon (or anyone else who had a similar experience) I'm just interested in a self reported view of the situation and wish you all the best.

      • Not easy to get a general reddit ban. Subreddits yet. Perhaps consistently using multiple accounts to upvote their own comments and/or attack vote others?

        • And here is a perfect example of why I just enjoy Reddit more: on slashdot I can't correct "yet" to "yes". On Reddit I would have done it by now and internet quality would be ever so slightly better.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I don't use Reddit much and I don't have a bad opinion on it but Slashdot number of users seems to have shrinked a lot. It's a pity. There used to be lots of comments in most stories. Also, lots of good ones at +4 or +5.
      I guess most people have moved to other places

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        Five or six years ago there was a horrible flood of ACs that made the site almost unusable for a time, at the same time that Dice had bought the site. I left for a couple of years after posting fairly regularly for well over a decade. Many of the old-time posters never came back, people who worked for NASA and JPL, CPU designers, Richard Stallman, the folks from Groklaw, and the like. It's too bad, I don't think Rob Malda ever imagined that the AC would become the plague that it was or he would never hav

  • So? (Score:1)

    by msauve ( 701917 )
    I'd guess the median age level on Reddit falls somewhere in middle school. Content is divided between questions which any reasonable web search would quickly answer, and replies which are mostly guesses.

    That applies to the tech forums I've explored, maybe there's a redeeming value elsewhere.

    • Everything depends on sub size. I think some game titles have decent subs. Likewise there are some subscribers that are circle jerks which have a certain humor to them but often it's like a "bitter vet", so interesting discussions occasionally brew.

      General rule of thumb, the larger the sub size the more there is a convergence of groupthink.

    • Actually there are grownups on Reddit who are using it to digest the science of Covid. For example https://old.reddit.com/r/COVID... [reddit.com]
      The rules that the Mods apply are pretty strict though. "We only allow the following: Peer-reviewed journal articles, preprints, academic comments (Lancet, Nature News, etc.), academic institution releases, and government agency (WHO, CDC, etc.) releases. No COVID trackers. No posting studies looking for participants. NO PERSONAL STORIES/INFO!!".

      • That's the covid19 subreddit. It's really decent, much like certain moderated usenet newgroups used to be. If you prefer pandemic news for the unwashed then r/coronavirus is for you. Be sure to only post bright eyed optimism unless you have karma to burn.

  • Garbage (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xession ( 4241115 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @11:38PM (#60784658)
    I used to really enjoy Reddit. My progression for news aggregation went from /. in the very early 2000s, on to Digg until they shit the bed and then over to Reddit for a long while and ever since the 2016 election, the entire culture has really seemed to go south. The original build-out of the site was an interesting concept, giving a lot of freedom for people to easily create tons of forums in a somewhat organized fashion. A new take on newsgroups maybe.

    However, unlike a true forum, posts go stale quickly as they age and discussions quickly die. The larger the subreddit, the more rapid the discussions seem to die as well as people are always trying to corral where everyone else is. With this and the voting system they have set up, it very strongly encourages low effort posts. Numerous web forums have dried up as users have gone to reddit, mistaking the platform for being a replacement with a larger userbase. Instead, you often get reddit-referencing jokes, some lame pun, or simply zero discussion at all. Reddit is like the Walmart of web forums, big, cheap and full of crap.

    On top of all this, for the past 4 years, they've made a strong effort in stacking a social media platform on top of this growing heap of shit. Now you can give reddit your hard earned money to give someone a meaningless badge for their shitty joke. I think what amazes me the most is how much reddit has really just transitioned into Digg from 2009-2010. They even replaced the default style of the site to a centered, heavily condensed nightmare of content so that now it looks like Facebook, Digg and Twitter had a big ol' bukkake.

    Reddit isnt all bad of course. I still find myself lured back as there are some good things to find. /r/legaladvice and the multitude of subreddits of people trying to figure out whats in, on, around whatever about a certain object can be really fascinating. But don't expect interest in a post to last more than a day.

    And then there's /. which I always seem to find myself coming back to find some of the better discussions on current events, which seem to last at least a few days. The site hasn't changed too much to piss me off over the years and you know what, thats a good damn thing.

    • Re:Garbage (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dargaud ( 518470 ) <slashdot2@nOSpaM.gdargaud.net> on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @04:05AM (#60785034) Homepage

      And then there's /. which I always seem to find myself coming back to find some of the better discussions on current events, which seem to last at least a few days. The site hasn't changed too much to piss me off over the years and you know what, thats a good damn thing.

      Yeah, the more I see/use other forums/social networks, the more i appreciate the moderation system of /.

      • This choice the user has to make between moderating and commenting.
      • The fact that you get mod points infrequently and only if you have already commented with good votes; so you don't want to waste them
      • The separation between various types of moderation (funny, insightful...)
      • The option to fine tune the moderation for each user (lower/increase the score of funny posts or some users for instance...)
      • The existence of meta-moderation (although it's been broken for me for a decade). I think it should be obligatory every once in a while or you can't post anymore.
      • The possibility of anonymous posts
      • Discussions that last a few days before archival
      • ...etc

      I see very few actual drawbacks to the /. system and they pale in comparision with the others forums/social networks ! I guess the main drawback is the limit of 20 new main posts a day... I wonder why nobody has launched a reddit-like system of channels with the same moderation system...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leptons ( 891340 )
      Your assessment is practically perfect. I gave up on reddit completely for a while and replaced it with "Hacker News" because they claim to have higher standards there, until I realized that HN is even more of a cesspool - people downvote but are too cowardly to tell you why. At least on reddit almost always there's an argument made for why you're wrong, or the comments are shitty trolls which at least lets you know it's trolls. But on HN, no... they downvote and that's it, even on well written comments tha

    • ever since the 2016 election, the entire culture has really seemed to go south

      when digg (or some other large reddit-like site) went down, redditors anticipated those users migrating to reddit... and the concern was that reddit would get flooded with tards, and stupid crap would get upvoted non-stop.

      that did happen to a fair degree, and it sucked, but it didnt break reddit like some had feared.

      then the 2016 election happened, and... reddit shat the bed. surreal liberal hysteria.

    • Yes web forums are dying, but not everyone is going to reddit. Facebook groups are exploding in popularity.
  • Hey..It’s not convenient out here. Why don’t we chat there ==>> https://is.gd/profile2854 [is.gd]
  • "We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true."
  • Wow, who created all those bots?

  • Been a regular for a few years.. (Score:3)

    by Vegan Cyclist ( 1650427 ) on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @01:08AM (#60784792) Homepage

    I like how there are local subreddits, and specific topics, and it's a quick scroll/read. Not too much garbage.

    I think they could do a lot more with their voting system though. The downvote is heavily abused and misunderstood. I almost never click it. People will most commonly hit it just because they disagree, which isn't the point - it's to be used to filter out off-topic posts/comments, etc.. And then there are 'vote brigades'. Of course I'm in a few vegan subreddits, and I disagree strongly with the people who go around and downvote anything that isn't 'pro vegan', kidding themselves into thinking that slacktivism is doing something. It's just a weird form of being anti-social, not to mention utter waste of time.

    My proposal is to limit how much you can downvote by your 'karma' (the points you get from upvotes.) If each downvote cost you 5 karma (or something like that), I bet things would be a lot more reasonable. (And people who post a lot of nonsense wouldn't have much karma, and would have less influence over what's visible as well. Win-win.)

    • The downvote is heavily abused and misunderstood. I almost never click it.

      Not clicking "downvote" isn't enough, unfortunately. The hivemind also needs to upvote content which is contrary to the hive's view, but which still meaningfully contributes to the discussion. It doesn't really matter if a post containing the minority opinion is at +1 or at -100. Neither will be seen buried behind all of the comments that have been upvoted to +1000 by the hivemind.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by N1AK ( 864906 )
        Not to defend Reddit, which I use but pretty much only because it's like a blackhole that has sucked in all discussion about various topics that used to exist elsewhere, but this isn't a Reddit specific problem. Any user moderated site is pretty much guaranteed to be moderated to highlight content that aligns with the "Groupthink" over the dissenting view. Scale the content up to the size of many reddit topics and that makes 99% of dissenting content effectively invisible. /. moderation is better, but "-1 I

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Reddit made the browser experience really, really bad to drive everyone to their app. Not wanting to use their app means putting up with the horrible UI, so I rarely go there.

      You know a company is fucked when some genius there decides that the best way to get people to use their data-raping, ad-displaying app is to make their core product as shitty as possible so people look for something better.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by leptons ( 891340 )
        old.reddit.com is still the same good old reddit UI. I refuse to use the newer reddit UI because it's hot garbage.
    • Reddit could fix their voting system if they wanted to. In fact, it used to be marginally better where they showed the actual vote counts so the upvote/downvote system can at least reflect the actual usage of the system in a statistical way. Instead, they made it worse by taking that away in 2015 or 2016. I really don't think you can have a system of unified honesty where people understand and respect two buttons that allow them to give points or take points away in an unlimited capacity where they're suppo

  • If their web interface was not so - how do I phrase this? - shit.

    • Go to the old version of the site [reddit.com]. It's pretty much the best interface of any internet discussion site, IMO.

      • Sorry, just no.

        Oldreddit sucks just as terrbily as Newreddit:

        Too few lines of discussion per page, rating buttons you hardly ever use given prominence, inconsistent wrapping, wrapping that does not expand to a user's screen width, way too much extraneous info BETWEEN lines of discussion, buttons between EVERY post, text not symbols on buttons that mixes with post text, Forum info that PRECEDES the discussion.
        IT'S A BLOODY MESS.

        • Slashdot has about twice as much extraneous info per comment as Old Reddit does, and thus a much lower density of comments.

          Wrapping that does not expand is fine, because a too-long single line is hard to read, and most comments are not long enough that this significantly affects the comment density.

          No site is perfect, but among major sites, Old Reddit is pretty much the best in terms of density of content, ease of use, and lack of JS cruft slowing the page down.

          • You counter my arguments by comparing it to SLASHDOT ?! BZZZT
            And then you picked out my wrapping comment: If I want to read wide, I want to read wide: LET THE USER DECIDE FFS.

            Old Reddit sucks, for the reasons I mentioned. The density could be doubled, it is full of distracting stuff that is hardly used.

            "The best" ?! Oh please.

  • Don't make me MemePool the ever livin' Fark outta ya'.

    Something Awful could happen.

    For all the kiddies and grammies and gramPas on their mobile OSs...Nothing you're seeing today hasn't happened before, nor will anything ever happen that hasn't happened before. Oh, there are some, some mind you, who will wax academically about how no other time in history has the rapidity of technological change these times do, or has been as backward, but Don't Panic.

    Read. Why? Because nothing's as old as a book. Nothi

  • I've been on reddit for a while, but I have to say: it's disappointing. It's fine for cute puppy pics, but if you want serious discussion, go somewhere else.

    One exception: really small, regional subreddits. Ones that have only a few hundred or a few thousand subscribers. These can be useful for local information.

    The large subreddits have too much traffic: you cannot possible read more than the topmost posts and comments. Since a lot of people pay attention to karma, they want upvotes - and that means pander

  • I walked (figuratively) away from Reddit months ago. Unless a Google search result comes up with a direct hit to my query I liken Reddit as the practical application of The Infinite Monkey Theorem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem). Imagine all those keystrokes unleashed on any particular Reddit topic...

  • Reddit recently banned two THOUSAND "hate subreddits", I would struggle to name 100 non-regional subreddits, let alone 2000. This resulted in the amount of "hate speech" on the platform being reduced by 18% [socialmediatoday.com].

    Meanwhile, harassment/doxxing brigades and subs devoted to lying for money, points, and sympathy such as /shitredditsays, /gamerghazi, /twoxchromosomes, /entitledparents, /amitheasshole, /femaledatingstrategy, /blackpeopletwitter, /fragilewhiteredditor, and /againsthatesubreddits are boosted to the front

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