If they were just talking about Reddit, I’d assume something dodgy was going on connected with the IPO. But Quora is supposedly back from the dead too… Am I missing something glaringly obvious here?
If they were just talking about Reddit, I’d assume something dodgy was going on connected with the IPO. But Quora is supposedly back from the dead too… Am I missing something glaringly obvious here?
Not even close if we’re talking about current users or active contributers. After they shut down third party apps and sided with advertisers over mods there was a huge migration off platform to several other platforms. Many smaller subreddits are ghost towns and the biggest ones that are still active have a smaller participating community, less total votes, and changing norms.
It’s not just eternal September, it’s the same thing that happened when digg died in reverse where communities grew and changed because people were joining. Users are adding site:reddit.com or whatever to Google searches because of SEO general searches are an advertising dumpster fire, but those search results are going to degrade over time along with the site’s quality if they continue to make such shitty decisions for communities and users or people move to other ai based search tools.
Where did everyone go? I thought Lemmy was the new hangout but it still seems so small, even popular posts are only getting a handful of comments?
Well, the federation kinda spreads users out. Like I can’t login to kbin on my Lemmy apps but I can see kbin posts, but the vast majority of my time is on lemmy. IOW it’s harder to participate across instances so less people.
There are other platforms that are probably suffering some form of the same fate, they got an influx of ex-redditors, but not a high enough volume to really take off and get high participation rates.
I dunno, I prefer Lemmy/fediverse. The churn isn’t there so you can actually interact with people instead of competing with inane reddit quips and top comment retreads.
I think its that many people didnt really leave reddit, some migrated to lemmy, some to discord, some to other small sites, and some just quit that style of website.
Lemmy definitely is still pretty small, but i think its growing pretty well (i remember checking it out years ago and it being a super tiny niche site). It takes time for things to set up & for users to get comfortable and grow communities they care about. Organic growth is slow.
For me, Lemmy content is better in every way, EXCEPT for local subs / communities. I really miss my well populated, engaged local subs.
It feels much more filled out than after the initial exodus. Smaller/niche communities are pretty bare, though.