r/GothStyle has 159k subscribers, r/tarot has 306k, r/cycling has 348k, r/rpg and r/political humor have 1.5m each, r/ExplainLikeImFive has 22.3m, and r/AskReddit has 41.4m.

Make of that what you will. I'm just giving numbers.

[–] DulyNoted@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Massive numbers of users is great for a business, but not necessarily great for discussion.

Lemmy doesn't feel like Reddit, but in a good way. Individual comments actually stand out, and it's not a sea of lowest common denominator trash and reposts.

I think people should stop conflating big numbers with success. If anything, we've seen the kind of nonsense big numbers lead to, with an IPO on the horizon and all that comes with that.

[–] throwawayforratings@lemmynsfw.com 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Like I said, it's just some raw data. Process it however you see fit.

[–] dufkm@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I'd say she did prosess it however she saw fit.

[–] b000urns@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

100%. Quality not quantity. There was clearly a tipping point where reddit blew up and the quality of responses from the "average" user went off a cliff

[–] airportline@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's much more difficult to sign up for a completely new website than it is to subscribe to subreddits on the site you already have an account for.

[–] throwawayforratings@lemmynsfw.com 5 points 1 year ago

This is true. Like I said, I'm not trying to make any implications; I'm just giving numbers for context.

[–] noodle@feddit.uk 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is interesting.

Obviously, I don't have stats on things like the % active accounts vs inactive and such, so this is pure speculation.

If you look at the hot sorted posts on r/GothStyle they seem to get around 100 or so points per post. Note, this isn't a direct translation into upvotes. It also says there is 145 people online - Does that mean roughly 2/3 of active users vote stuff to hot? ~100 people holding up a niche community with a fraction of those the posters themselves.

So in effect ~0.1% of a subreddit's subscribers makes things happen. I always baselessly suspected that Reddit fluffs up the numbers to make engagement seem like it is much greater than it is, but this is 1000x smaller than the sub count suggests.

I'm sceptical of my maths here but r/PCMasterRace is similar. Out of nearly 8mil subscribers, roughly 8000 online.

[–] throwawayforratings@lemmynsfw.com 4 points 1 year ago

It also says there is 145 people online - Does that mean roughly 2/3 of active users vote stuff to hot? ~100 people holding up a niche community with a fraction of those the posters themselves.

For this, it's important to remember that's the number of people online at that very moment, but the vote count is persistent. Any number of those upvotes could have come from users who aren't online presently, but had been online an hour or two prior. ~66%, in this case, is not the actual amount, it's just the upper bound.

I always baselessly suspected that Reddit fluffs up the numbers to make engagement seem like it is much greater than it is, but this is 1000x smaller than the sub count suggests.

It's possible, and very plausible, that they do this, but it's much less plausible (though still possible) that they do it to that degree.

[–] weeahnn@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Doesn't really mean anything. Facebook has around 3.4 billion active monthly users. Reddit has around 400 million. I'd still take the latter than the former. Lemmy will keep growing. Probably will never have 100s of millions of users and that's fine. More users can be a good thing but by itself the numbers mean nothing.

[–] throwawayforratings@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 1 year ago

Again: just giving numbers. Make of them what you will.

[–] overzeetop@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The difference is in the active number of content creators and participants. It’s nice to have a sub with ten million followers but if Gallowboob is the only one posting and his 250 bots are the only ones voting it’s just a popular Twitter account. That is good for ad revenue but shit for interaction.

Give me a vibrant, intelligent, argumentative (in a good way) 100,000 over a passive ten million any day.

[–] throwawayforratings@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 1 year ago

As far as presenting raw data goes, I'd be interested in seeing numbers on what percentage of subreddit subscribers are actual active users. If 90% of the 1.5m subscribers on r/rpg are bots and inactive accounts, then the remaining 10% of real posters is roughly equal to the 150k on Lemmy. That is, at least, assuming Lemmy doesn't have any bots or inactive accounts. I'd be interested in seeing the numbers for that, too.