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Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US

1361 points by Mahn 8y ago

nielsbot 8y ago
The also have the highest "daily time on site" of all the sites on the list by a good amount. (15m vs 10+m for runner-up Facebook) That said, are these numbers reliable? And: Don't a lot of people visit FB via an app? I assume that's not counted here.
- iamunr 8y ago
  Same could be same for Reddit, and their app ecosystem.
  - emn13 8y ago
    I can't say I'm enthused by reddit-on-mobile. I stick to the desktop version. No idea if I'm alone in that...
    - hoffbrau99 8y ago
      100% this
    - strig 8y ago
      Do you use the first-party app? It's probably the worst option out there.
    - nielsbot 8y ago
      Apollo on iOS is good IMO
    - foepys 8y ago
      https://i.reddit.com https://i.reddit.com is a good balance between app and the desktop website. A lot faster than m.reddit.com and supports the basic features of reading comments, commenting, and submitting. It also doesn't crash all the time and saves data.
    - zbuttram 8y ago
      There are some quality third-party clients on mobile. I like Apollo on iOS right now.
    - AlexandrB 8y ago
      Narwhal on iOS is pretty great. First-party reddit app is quite bad. Ironically reddit heavily pushes their official mobile app if you visit on mobile Safari.
      - thirdsun 8y ago
        These days Apollo seems to be the best reddit client on iOS: https://apolloapp.io/ https://apolloapp.io/
    - cornholio 8y ago
      Boost is great on Android.
  - yurishimo 8y ago
    And the fact that Reddit has literally dozens of apps across all of the mobile platforms. Having a mostly open API gave 3rd party developers the opportunity to create better interfaces to draw users into using Reddit. When I first started using Reddit over 6 years ago, it was mostly desktop, but these days, probably 90% of my Reddit usage is mobile because I feel more productive (ironic) using a nicer interface with gesture support for voting and replying. I would bet that there are a million+ users primarily on 3rd party mobile apps around the world who, if not more.
hit8run 8y ago
Thx to Aaron.
- soulchild37 8y ago
  I am still sad about how corporate greed caused his death
tammer 8y ago
I've recently been thinking that Reddit holds a lot of potential that has yet to be tapped or expired. The recent pivots post CEO change (mobile app, redesign, crackdown on garbage) speak to a future where currently fractured private communities such as those on Discourse or Slack can find a more publicly accessible presence. Facebook Groups, while immensely popular, currently falls into the same opt-in, zero-discoverability category. The timing couldn't be better with the hollowing-out of Tumblr.
- chipperyman573 8y ago
  >The timing couldn't be better with the hollowing-out of Tumblr. What happened? I haven't heard about this.
  - beanboot 8y ago
    Yeah I’d like to hear more about this “hollowing out.”
    - hoffbrau99 8y ago
      What's Tumblr?
  - agentdrtran 8y ago
    recent redesign massively increased ads and "recommended posts" as well as many users/communities being banned for being NSFW.
- falcon620 8y ago
  Reddit is getting so much usage because it hasn't been monetized yet. At the moment it's quite good free user forum/board/discussion/community-style site. The new design will drive the users who liked that away. They will either eventually scatter away to hundreds of different places, or one or two new companies will take Reddit's current place.
  - SquareWheel 8y ago
minimaxir 8y ago
Looking at Reddit data on BigQuery, the number of sitewide submissions has been growing steadily, despite the continual drama: https://i.imgur.com/V8AptYU.png https://i.imgur.com/V8AptYU.png Query to reproduce: #standardSQL SELECT TIMESTAMP_TRUNC(TIMESTAMP_SECONDS(created_utc), MONTH) as mon, COUNT(*) as num_submissions FROM `fh-bigquery.reddit_posts.*` WHERE (_TABLE_SUFFIX BETWEEN '2016_01' AND '2018_02' OR _TABLE_SUFFIX = 'full_corpus_201512') GROUP BY mon ORDER BY mon
- wrinkl3 8y ago
  The continual drama bothers only a relatively minor group of power users. A lot of newcomers to Reddit are casual submitters who neither know nor care about it.
  - woah 8y ago
    I think the continual drama mostly bothers non reddit users and reporters
    - snarkyturtle 8y ago
      I haven't seen very negative coverage about the redesign, which I assume is what the "continual drama" is about.
    - sp527 8y ago
      No such thing as bad publicity. I'm listening to Pusha T even as I write this.
- tmpz22 8y ago
  I wonder if an increasing bot population is playing into this. If you believe the premise that "power users" are responsible for most content, and then notice content submissions are rising with user registrations, then that might suggest that either the paradigm has shifted or the content is fake.
  - 8y ago
askafriend 8y ago
I didn't realize Quora was so incredibly dependent on search...even more so than Yelp.
nategri 8y ago
I admit after reading this headline I was scratching my head as to what #2 could be. And then I looked and it was super obvious haha.
- aantix 8y ago
  "You're Not Going to Believe Who is #2.."
zer0faith 8y ago
Now the NSA will collect data from Reddit.
- falcon620 8y ago
  And us foreigners will be asked for our Reddit usernames when we enter the US.
- to_bpr 8y ago
  >Now You'd have to be very naive to believe the intelligence agencies haven't been tapped into Reddit for a very long time already. If JTRIG is active on Flickr[0], you can be damned sure they're all over Reddit. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intelligence_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellig...
exelius 8y ago
Reddit works because it’s anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free. Change any one of those three and the user base will abandon you. It’s been Reddit’s dilemma since the beginning: you can’t monetize a toxic user base that has total freedom. Sure you can try to drive away the toxic users, but it turns out that those toxic users are also pretty influential in non-toxic aspects. I’m still skeptical of Reddit’s ability to turn a profit. But as a community platform it’s the best out there IMO.
- falcon620 8y ago
  Surely it should be possible to run something like Reddit at a profit? Run it with like 50 people. And not necessarily in SF. I think that's doable if you're happy with where the site is, product-wise. Just googled quickly and found a figure of 250 employees from last year.
  - exelius 8y ago
    Right; if you run the Craigslist model. Reddit has been more interventionist with content, which means they need more people to manage the community. I would guess they have all the developers they need...
    - falcon620 8y ago
      I don't get the impression they are spending a whole lot on community management. In a way, that's a big part of what I see as their largest problem - they are relying on the zeal of the subreddit moderators to work for free. (They should have a model which allows moderators for large subreddits to get paid. And for the subscribers to vote for moderators.) This is why the large subreddits are so incredibly polarized in either left or right directions - the moderators are not paid to deal with things fairly, they are there spending their time working free - the only benefit they get is that they get to enforce their particular political choice onto others in their subreddit. Look at e.g. r/politics and r/the_donald as extreme examples of what I'm talking about.
      - 8y ago
midoreigh 8y ago
Reddit is going down.
- dang 8y ago
  Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
  - ahmetkun 8y ago
    After all, this isn't reddit, right? :)
synaesthesisx 8y ago
It blows my mind that Facebook is even top 5. Do people actually spend time on the site?
- init-as 8y ago
  They have over 200 million users in the US.. https://www.statista.com/statistics/398136/us-facebook-user-age-groups/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/398136/us-facebook-user-...
- rconti 8y ago
  Data point of 1: I use Facebook all the time and I think Reddit is terrible. Half the subreddits I see are toxic and the other half are people with 0 life experience. I have tried many times to derive value from it (much like Twitter, its advocates tell you you have to 'curate your feed') but no matter how much time I invest, I just can't make it work.
- cm2012 8y ago
  Dude, 50% of the american population uses Facebook every single day of their lives (according to FB's quarterly statements, which would be a serious crime to lie on).
  - anonytrary 8y ago
    I think he was making a distinction between the app and the site. AFAIK, most Facebook users utilize Facebook primarily through the mobile app. If you look at Google trends[0] for Facebook, you'll notice a linear decline since 2011. I believe this is due to the onset of the Facebook mobile app, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. [0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=facebook https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=f...
jimmies 8y ago
I have recently created a software package and wanted a forum to have my users post "fun" stuff that is not strictly technical since it's sort of a hobby. I have decided that it is way too tedious to host my own forums, so I chose a middle ground that is to create a subreddit. It is working out pretty well. There are be several reasons that hosting a forum/fanclub on Reddit is better than on Facebook. Facebook mandates real name use, one username for everything that not everyone is comfortable with, I'm sure everyone on HN is already aware of that. But I think there is another subtle reason. In the past, I have relied on Facebook to host another hobbyist project, and it was super active. I thought what is more convenient than having one place to notify users about the ongoings and stuff and plus having a mobile app that kicks ass, right? It turned out, after a while, the group died. No one would interact with our news anymore, even when we don't spam them with junk news. I think the subtle reasons is that Facebook is way too aggressive on interaction. Maybe something exciting is happening and many people flock to comment on it, and so Facebook spams everyone with notifications and emails about the current ongoing that many of the users don't care about. If a user gets annoyed and decides to mute the group, then I will lose a good, caring person forever. Reddit has no such jealous nudging mechanism, the user has to explicitly check that subreddit to know. So the participation becomes much more passive and the user can choose to update about the ongoings at their own convenience. It turns out being more gentle for hobbyist groups wins over being aggressive. Not that I only have those two choices, though...
- chaseha 8y ago
  A lot of that may be due to the way Facebook has changed their algorithms in the last few years. I know that both Pages and Groups that don't pay for engagement have had huge issues with their content no longer showing up in follower's feeds. Could be that rather than users "ignoring" the group
- djsumdog 8y ago
  If you wanted to run one yourself, you could always setup a Lobsters instance.
- jgh 8y ago
  OTOH Reddit also enforces time as a limitation on posts, just on a slightly slower scale than Facebook. For example "necroposting" isn't really a thing that's possible with a Reddit (or HN) model. Nor are threads that are ongoing for months at a time, which are quite common on traditional forums. I mean you can do it but it has to be mod-sanctioned via pinning.
cwperkins 8y ago
Reddit is quickly becoming a tool for the majority on the site to suppress minority on the site's opinions. Until a viable solution is created to promote diversity of thought it will always suffer from this problem. Reddit is just as bad of an echo chamber as facebook. Please everyone who read stuff posted on reddit, engage in critical thinking after each article you read.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  When you say the majority vs the minority, what do you mean? edit: To Clarify, which groups are you labeling as such?
  - cwperkins 8y ago
    It means different things in different contexts. For instance in r/southafrica there is a majority of Afrikaaners on the subreddit despite being a minority (10%) of the country. Any anti-Afrikaaner content is quickly dismissed and downvoted. In r/TwoXChromosome engaging in any discussion on the wage gap as a function of anything other than sexism is met with downvotes. In any majority US subreddit conservative posts may be dismissed and downvoted into oblivion. This tool of upvote/downvote is used to suppress non hive mind opinions on the site and I didn't necessarily mean this in the US specific context.
    - idoh 8y ago
      Well, there is quite a bit of free expression still. Anyone is empowered to make a subreddit and moderate how they please. What more do you want?
      - cwperkins 8y ago
        This lack of diversity of media/thought just propagates our current media landscape where people generally fall into 2 camps: Liberal sources (CNN/NBC/NYT) and then Fox viewers. With reddit there's a real opportunity to give readers a diversity of opinion, but in this upvote/downvote scheme usually the opposing opinion is buried so that it may never be seen. At least from my POV the thing reddit could improve from in this respect may be more of going into a HN type model by removing the downvote button.
cuddlypsycho 8y ago
Reddit has the illusion of anonymity which gives its users a false sense of privacy so they can act the way they truly are (parallels to Westworld if you watch the show). It would be incredibly easy for Reddit to de-anonymize its user base, the same way Facebook was trying to do with medical metadata, and sell that info (at least for the US users, given GDPR in EU now)
glorkk 8y ago
I’m really surprised Yahoo is #7, I thought Yahoo was all but dead.
- wcfields 8y ago
  Think of all the grandparents that have Win Vista / XP machines with IE defaulted to Yahoo. Also, all the spyware/malware/adware seems to be wrappers around a Yahoo search for some reason.
- H1Supreme 8y ago
  Yeah, this is very surprising. Even more surprising is how high Github and Stack Overflow are.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- canada_dry 8y ago
  I've had my secondary email accts on yahoo for over 20 years, but am moving all the attached accts to another service. The moment Verizon bought them they immediately started spamming targeted ads based on the content of my email - so long, and thanks for all the fish yahoo!
ChrisArchitect 8y ago
tell me again how Alexa even gets this data these days? I mean ages ago it was thru sketchy browser addon toolbars etc, but seriously how many are installed now? Never really trusted their numbers
- jakewins 8y ago
  Same as how TV and Radio ratings are done - statistically significant sampling of the population via surveys: https://support.alexa.com/hc/en-us/articles/200449744-How-are-Alexa-s-traffic-rankings-determined- https://support.alexa.com/hc/en-us/articles/200449744-How-ar...
  - cm2012 8y ago
    The global data panel is not surveys of a random population. It's data collected from people using Alexa toolbars. It's highly weighted towards desktop traffic and the kind of people who install toolbars.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
ThinkBeat 8y ago
Why is Yahoo so far up the list? Do they have anything good anymore?
- ben174 8y ago
  Mail, for one. People are very tied to their email address and don't like changing it.
  - B0btheBuilder 8y ago
    I have three siblings and one parent still using Yahoo. The other parent uses Outlook. They just don't wanna deal with the hassle of moving to Gmail.
to_bpr 8y ago
As a long, long time user of Reddit, it has been quite saddening to see its descent into the shallow, ultra-toxic husk of a corporate entity that it is today. I'm not surprised by its popularity; it's a headline-surfers paradise, one in which you get feel good points for displays of virtue or shitposting easily digested content in an era of unparalleled narcissism and shortened attention spans. All is not lost though; as the steaming pile of defecation of the internet it serves effectively in attracting and distracting basically those who would otherwise pollute the greater internet community with their presence. So congrats, Reddit, I guess.
- hoffbrau99 8y ago
  I'd like a reddit-like site that is more exclusive, it filters out the non-serious users with a yearly subscription fee of say $100.
  - tmpz22 8y ago
    Subscription filters might also filter out un-employed content producers who have free time to produce the quality content in the first place.
  - curiousgal 8y ago
    Metafilter started with premise but it grew into something so obnoxious imo.
  - heckanoobs 8y ago
    I've made reddit more enjoyable in the past by using plugins that auto collapse comments past depth 1 or 2. On avg, conversation devolves past that point. I've since quit Reddit but comments here have convinced me to take a second look. I think this time around I will put even more filters in place, like no subreddits with over 10k subs, and some way to hide everyone's karma count including my own. I guess what I'm trying to say is maybe you and I don't need a pay wall to filter, we just need an opinionated browser plugin (or easy way to share settings in RES)
  - empath75 8y ago
cm2012 8y ago
Keep in mind: 1) Most Facebook users use the app, not the website, which Alexa doesn't track (Which is also why Facebook doesn't fear commonly used ad blockers). 2) Alexa uses a number of metrics to rank sites, including pages visited. Reddit users load many more individual pages than FB users. In reality, Reddit is nowhere near close to the traffic and engagement leviathan that is Facebook.
- devy 8y ago
  I agree. The amount of the network, data center engineering resources between facebook and reddit aren't even on the same magnitude.
  - Vogtinator 8y ago
    That's not really comparable. Facebook needs much more computation while reddit is basically just a database full of text.
    - skeletonjelly 8y ago
      Each user has their own view of the frontpage though, which is computationally pretty expensive. Trees of comments similarly can get data heavy. Hard to compare IMO
- bpicolo 8y ago
  It's quite possible that Reddit has many more mobile users than desktop users, but I can't say whether the official app is the most-used of the bunch
- kkarp 8y ago
  plus a lot of Facebook users concerned about their privacy installed some third party script blockers. They are probably now below Alexa's radar
  - baby 8y ago
    There's no way this amount to a significant number.
intrasight 8y ago
I avoided Reddit for many years - for no good reason mind you, I just didn't "get" it. Now I do and I am a big fan.
hoffbrau99 8y ago
Why did it take so long?
Alex3917 8y ago
Reddit’s year-over-year growth has been outrageous. A year ago I categorized each of the top 5,000 subredddits, and many of them have gained 10x the subscribers since then. For a website that’s been around for this long it’s absolutely unreal.
- tim333 8y ago
  Yeah congrats Spez.
u801e 8y ago
> Reddit works because it’s anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free. Change any one of those three and the user base will abandon you. Usenet meets all three criteria, but it definitely is not used nearly as much as it was in the past.
FrozenVoid 8y ago
Most of reddit content is facebook-tier entertaiment, I have to create a filter script to block thousands of irrelevant subreddits to increase signal-to-noise ratio. (filter script in question: http://void.wikidot.com/code:reddit-contentfilter-user-js http://void.wikidot.com/code:reddit-contentfilter-user-js )
Shank 8y ago
The biggest value gain from Reddit, to me, is the ability to centralize effectively around different hobbies and activities. In the past, if you wanted to find an online community for a movie or a game, you had to find a forum for that community. Finding forums that are well managed and capture a good segment of the community is hard -- and Reddit just becomes a default place to look now. Let's say a new TV show starts airing, and you really like it and want to discuss it more. You can probably bet there's a subreddit for it, and in that community, a ton of people interested in it. You can bet there are threads for discussing it in other parts of Reddit too. Worst case, you can make one yourself. This is something that everyone has in common. Everyone has a community they want to "be apart of" and Reddit lets you express yourself to those communities without having an identity tied to that community. There are groups on Facebook, but it's so tied to you that it's hard to just be a part of a community. On Twitter, people tend to congregate around others in their interest domain, but by default, all posts go everywhere. Someone into a show on Twitter is going to dilute their feed and have a similarly diluted feed if they discuss it. In contrast, a subreddit is a concentrated mass of people around a topic. I don't really get much value outside of this centralization. The default subreddits are too general for my taste, so I don't subscribe to many. But for the 80-90 different topics and communities I like to see, it's great.
- slivym 8y ago
  I think the flip side to this is that the communities are becoming so large now that they aren't really a community. I sometimes go on the /r/UK and the level of discussion gets lower and lower as the community dissolves. Rather than getting to know people everyone is just shouting into the void - unaware of who anyone else is.
  - killjoywashere 8y ago
    I think this is more associated with the fact that all communities (real communities) are small. Try a more focused interest group. /r/pathology, for example, is only a few thousand folks, mainly people working at the graduate or post-doctoral level.
DonHopkins 8y ago
What surprises me is now far down PornHub is on the list. Reddit way sticker than PornHub!
beauzero 8y ago
Unfortunately they may think that it was because of the redesign. joking, joking, well kind of. yeah, no, the redesign is awful...still.
trisimix 8y ago
Just as reddit is losing its charm to me...
myth_buster 8y ago
Wow, the _Daily Time on Site_ is the best in top 50. I've always felt they sold early.
rc-1140 8y ago
Reddit has always been a strange place to me, even as it has grown to be a cornerstone of socialization on the internet. I didn't grow up with it, I'm still not a huge fan of the layout even after the redesign, the way comments work still annoys me, and there are still plenty of stereotypical Reddit users that I do not want to associate or be associated with. However, I can no longer deny that it serves no purpose or that it is arbitrarily bad: it has a bevy of information I simply can't get anywhere else, "everyone" uses it in some manner so it's not an unknown in conversation, and it's got plenty of niche communities that might appeal to my interests. In the process, it's eaten up all sorts of one-off forums and communities that don't wave the Reddit flag because it's just way easier to make a Reddit board for your interest/community. Reddit also doesn't have cute features like emoticons, their markdown isn't as intuitive as BBCode tags to me, and the versatility of a given Reddit board is limited to what can be done with CSS and each board's Wiki. Files have to be hosted elsewhere (game mods, game recordings via SourceTV and similar, etc.), though this isn't anywhere near as big of a deal as I'm making it. Am I joining the e-Dinosaur ranks?
- agentdrtran 8y ago
  Restricting CSS and wikis to be standardized is fantastic - it means that mobile users and desktop users might actually get to see the same subreddit.
  - rc-1140 8y ago
    For my interests, I guess I can't see the value in a mobile user; maybe in some really one-off cases in my interests it would be prudent for a unified view? The most I've seen a Reddit board do is have fancier sidebar links. My thoughts when it comes to having differentiated Reddits are forum-like features such as shoutboxes, hyper-specific file uploads, or even flat-out disabling Karma on that board (dunno if that one is already possible). Sure I can have a forum with all of these features, but not the ease of use or traffic that Reddit gets. Like I hope I got across in my previous post, still undecided and hesitant on Reddit as a whole, even to this day.
    - 8y ago
IronWolve 8y ago
Newsgroups took a dive when people moved to web forums, scattered all around the web. Now people are moving back to a centralized website, reddit, that's interestingly almost like reading newsgroup threads. Always thought the biggest problem with forums, not feeding RSS feeds back into newsgroups to keep it alive. But then, you couldn't reply, and was only for archival purposes. At least with Reddit, I can use ifttt to push content into reddit, and make the discussion happen on reddit, in dedicated subs.
Matachines 8y ago
What surprises be about reddit is that they get advertisers and ads while having one of the largest porn communities. No one talks about this, and people are quick to say "Tumblr/4chan is just porn!", but not only is there a myriad of porn subreddits, many of them have OC content (people posting themselves), who thanks to reddit's new profile followers feature have a fanbase. One only needs to look at /r/sexsells (NSFW) to see this in action. With the shutdown of Craigslist personals, people are (using and have been using) reddit for hookups as well. Crazy that they "get away" with the #1 killer of social media platform ad revenue.
- jonlucc 8y ago
  I suspect this is due to a firewall between the types of content. I don't remember what interview I was listening to years ago, but I think it was Matt Cutts who said that Google has a whole porn team that makes sure that when you want porn, you get the most relevant porn sites and when you don't want porn, you get none. I think Reddit is in the same boat. People don't avoid Google ads because they might end up on porn; in fact, lots of products only want to be placed next to porn.
- manfredo 8y ago
  If my understanding is correct, subreddits that host NSFW material (or at least, a substantial amount of it) get tagged and age gated. I imagine it's pretty easy to let advertisers opt out of those areas.
  - bruhbruhbruh 8y ago
    That is correct. Advertisers target specific subreddits and/or "interest groups". No NSFW advertisements should appear in safe-for-work communities. https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/advertising/advertising-101/frequently-asked-questions https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/advertising/adverti... What are age-gated subreddits? Age-gated subreddits are those that are listed as NSFW(18+). We ask that advertisers advertising adult-related products/services focus their targeting on these subreddits to ensure we are serving ads to the appropriate audience.
  - 8y ago
_seemethere 8y ago
Why doesn't reddit try to roll out an enterprise product? I'm sure a lot of companies would be willing to pay to have an interface like reddit internally. Most current solutions for this problem aren't very good and I feel like reddit could be a good alternative. (not the redesign though, loading times on that would make it basically unusable)
- rnet85 8y ago
  Doesn't stackexchange enterprise already fill that niche?
  - CM30 8y ago
    Does Stackexchange enterprise let users create sites/subreddits?
- exelius 8y ago
  I feel a subreddit is a good solution when you need to have a discussion with over 1,000 people. That’s an arbitrary number, but it’s the point at which personal relationships break down and it becomes a “flat” discussion. I don’t think Reddit is a very good way to push say, an HR policy to a bunch of branch offices. There are better tools for that job (including Facebook’s corporate offerings).
- RandallBrown 8y ago
  About 6 years ago we had a self hosted reddit that someone hacked to hook in to our ActiveDirectory. It's the best QA/Wiki/Group communication tool I've ever used at a company. I've thought a few times that you could build a startup on selling a modified version of open source reddit to enterprises. (Not sure how much of reddit is open source anymore though.)
  - usmannk 8y ago
    How does this solution compare to, say, Slack in your experience?
echelon 8y ago
Anyone interested in building an open source, add-free, Creative Commons-licensed (perhaps not the posts as these belong to users, but the posts in aggregate) copy of Reddit? My ideal "Reddit" more closely follows the freedoms of Wikipedia / FOSS. Reddit currently allows 3rd party clients to have access, but I envision more - an analytics API, ML tools to train your own consumption / discovery agent about what you like, filter out noise (including comments!), etc. Reddit functioned with a skeleton crew for awhile. A small team could subsist on donations and build something for the public good. Something community owned and operated could be of tremendous value, and we wouldn't worry so much over its uncertain future. Federation could even be built in...
- lightyrs 8y ago
  The federation aspect is very interesting to me. Can you describe in more detail?
  - echelon 8y ago
    I imagine it would be similar to Mastodon, but instead of people being on a node, you'd have communities on a node. One server might focus on the southeast, eg. /r/atlanta, /r/georgia, /r/falcons, etc. Another might focus on gaming, hosting subtopics such as /r/nintendo, /r/minecraft, /r/ps4, etc. If you're on one machine, you can have it pull in discussions from other nodes. Or your client software might do that automatically for you. Nodes might agree on a common short form namespace to refer to different communities, and we might even be able to bolt this on to existing systems, eg. /r/me_irl is Reddit, whereas /hn/show is "Show Hacker News". It doesn't necessarily have to be backwards-compatible with non-fedarated systems, but it could be. I imagine single sign on, and good APIs for ingesting another community's or user's content. Ranking metadata can also be supplied by the host community, but local communities or individuals can apply their own transformative equations on top of them.
    - iN7h33nD 8y ago
      I was just thinking of something exactly like this. I started my own nas in my basement using yunohost and I really think self hosting on old hardware and federation could finally help decentralize the internet.
danso 8y ago
So this doesn't account for mobile native app usage, right? My impression is that mobile accounts for the vast majority of Facebook users. In the 2018 Q1 earnings report, FB saiid that 91% of its ad revenue came from mobile: https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2018/Facebook-Reports-First-Quarter-2018-Results/default.aspx https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
- NullPrefix 8y ago
  Because adblock is not available for apps?
_raoulcousins 8y ago
I've never heard of diply or providr. Everything else on the top 50 I'm at least aware of.
- RandallBrown 8y ago
  Diply is one of those horrible list aggregator websites. I see ads for it on facebook constantly. Generally it's just a list of 10 things from an AskReddit thread.
moultano 8y ago
Facebook's app is popular. Reddit's app isn't.
isarac 8y ago
And it shows. What's the new website to go to?
toephu2 8y ago
Anyone know what reddit's DAU is? They used to publish this publicly (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic) but since trying to become a real business and monetize they have since taken that down. edit: I see from https://web.archive.org/web/20170507102752/https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic https://web.archive.org/web/20170507102752/https://www.reddi... on 2017/5/1 they hit 1M DAU.
tromp 8y ago
The Alexa statistics look suspect in some countries. The top 10 most popular websites in the Netherlands [1] includes 3 Russian websites, with Vk.com at #4. [1] https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/NL https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/NL
jackmodern 8y ago
Love reddit. Don't understand why it took this long to pass FB.
iblaine 8y ago
But which site gets more traffic from Russian bots, facebook or reddit?
HeavyStorm 8y ago
Side effect of people migrating to Facebook Mobile while reddit is still more popular on desktops? On Google's Play Store, Facebook is said to have 76 million users. Reddit has only 630k users.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
No disrespect to Reddit, but that's __a lot__ of visitors + page views for what a fair percentage of the population might not be aware of (in a FB, etc. sort of way). Maybe I'm not questioning Reddit's "fame" per se, but the validity of the algorithm that puts them at #3. Perhaps it's just me?
z3t4 8y ago
Reading Reddit is like reading an article in a newspaper on a subject you are well versed in ... Then you read about something you know nothing about - while having the ability to upvote/downvote, and happily vote, even if you are not really qualified, and have now forgotten that the facts are probably backwards or wrong.
BadassFractal 8y ago
Reddit is super valuable from the perspective of being able to poll a "hive mind" specialized in a certain thing about best practices and ideas. e.g. I want to learn more about making EDM, more about photography, more about shibari etc. Usually the advice is pretty decent between beginner and intermediate level, for the high end super-custom guidance usually it falls flat.
camelCaseOfBeer 8y ago
Funny how the figure is ultimately inversely proportional to quality of content. Sites begin wanting great content so they can end by attracting the users who make awful content.
tomc1985 8y ago
That's crazy how Yahoo is at #7 and is widely considered a failure
mastazi 8y ago
And according to the same link Reddit is first in terms of daily time on site, which apparently is extremely valuable in the ads world.
Iggyjay 8y ago
This is less about reddits sudden greatness and more about the canis familiaris that faceache have been fornicating
paulsutter 8y ago
Alexa ratings are based on people who run the Alexa toolbar. Which is dominated by webmaster types who care about Alexa. Who are more likely to be redditors than the average user.
O1111OOO 8y ago
The sourced link states that Facebook as 7,127,042 sites that link to it. Seems excessive. I often find sites linking to Amazon (824,044), Youtube (2,722,482), Wikipedia (1,928,776), Imgur (172,079) but rarely to Facebook. Maybe this has to do with Facebook's plugin/commenting system that tracks across the web(?). Possibly social networks cross-supporting eachother, that is... twitter (5,421,978) linking to Facebook and vice versa.
dynofuz 8y ago
What does it mean by popularity? Number of visitors? Number of visitors x time spent on site?
rblion 8y ago
I don't use FB at all, IG once or twice a week, SC a few times a months when I eat out nice or do something super cool worth sharing. I use reddit every day and sometimes night. Favorite website of all-time.
erd0s 8y ago
More surprising is that yahoo is #7! I might be out of touch but I can’t think of a single person that uses yahoo, maybe it might be the default homepage on my grandmas computer...
- gnulinux 8y ago
  I've never seen anyone who used Yahoo too. I've seen one or two people who used Bing and even Yandex (lol) but no Yahoo.
massysett 8y ago
Says more about the stagnation of the Web than the rise of Reddit or the fall of Facebook. Facebook has market-leading apps. People are getting their Facebook through apps, not Web. Meanwhile, until very recently Reddit's app was a joke.
pwaai 8y ago
Well reddit is pretty much the only site that I compulsively check. I no longer care about Facebook. Actually I prefer anonymous reddit users more.
methodover 8y ago
Reddit frightens me way more than Facebook ever did. Reddit gives the impression of what ideas are popular with its rating and comment system. But those systems are remarkably easy to manipulate. Imagine a Russian troll farm operation making a certain favored candidate look far more popular than he is, for example. Or a corporation rallying fake support around a piece of legislation. Sock puppetry on an industrial scale could pose a serious threat to our democracy. Reddit needs to figure out how they could mitigate that threat.
igammarays 8y ago
I gave up on Reddit a while ago because it is such a massive time-sink. Kills productivity like no other. Atleast Twitter is short and digestible. Reddit can eat entire days. But now I want to come back and see if I can strike a balance. Can anyone recommend great focused subreddits to keep my frontpage junktainment-free?
- fwn 8y ago
  Your frontpage is junkfree after you unfollowed all the defaults and blocked the ads. After that, it's literally empty. Now follow subs on topics you are interested in. I do it that way and I only have to unfollow in very few cases due to a lack of moderation or an usergrowth that brings in the masses. I also avoid threads that get discovered by an audience beyond the initial subreddit it was posted in. That's easy to notice as conversation immediately stops and mindless chain commenters make karma rain over each other.
beedogs 8y ago
Reddit's also become the #1 white nationalist site on the Internet. And the admins don't seem to care. Shut it down.
mastrsushi 8y ago
The initial idea of Facebook is great. I can't exactly knock it when this site is heavily influenced. But the problem with having specific boards that satisfy every little interest is that an echo chamber effect often occurs. My karma on that site is so low, not because of trolling, but speaking my own opposing views. I'll never be able to post on a FreeBSD subreddit, claiming a specific case where I find Linux better suited. Or when I read the OpenBSD mailing list and post that Theo De Raadt needs to get a grip, when he rejects Rust because no core utilities have been implemented. Making points that radical are just asking for trouble. It's a great way to collaborate with people within the same niche, but it's a clique. They only want to hear themselves talk. Believe it or not, despite 4chan's well known toxicity, boards like /g/, /adv/, and /mu/ are perfect examples of true anomity. Where specific interests are shared within threads of each board. They may come off harsh to the light hearted, but they're not afraid of opinions.
- steveklabnik 8y ago
  Side note, my understanding is not that OpenBSD rejects Rust due to "no core utilities have been implemented", but because it cannot bootstrap from a C compiler alone.
  - mastrsushi 8y ago
    Do you have a link to that? So much for self-hosting.
    - steveklabnik 8y ago
      What do you mean? Rust is self-hosting; that’s exactly the issue. It’s written in Rust.
TekMol 8y ago
I wonder how much traction a lightweight Reddit with a nice clean html interface would get. Something like HN but with unlimited categories, not just all/show/ask. I would love such a thing. For me, Reddit already was on the edge of being too bloated before the redesign. Now I barely use it anymore. Before the redesign, I was on HN like 10 times a day and on Reddit 5 times a day or so. Now I use Reddit maybe once a day. And I always have this 'Uh oh this is going to be annoying. Do I really want to check it?' feeling.
- newman8r 8y ago
  I think you need a pretty significant community size to make the 'subreddit' model work. It's kind of a 'chicken or the egg' problem. I believe reddit didn't even offer subreddits initially.
  - TekMol 8y ago
    Maybe. Then starting with just a few categories and slowly adding more might be a good approach.
    - gnulinux 8y ago
      You mean like 4chan? Also you can make your own reddit client, it has a pretty open API. So, you can make your own reddit client looking like HN.
codeismylife 8y ago
It's strange to see GitHub so high up there. I wouldn't have thought it plausible.
bad_user 8y ago
What’s interesting to me is that YouTube is more popular than Facebook. I realize that Facebook gets used a lot on mobile phones and that overall it’s probably more popular. But it’s still incredible that YouTube.com is more popular than Facebook.com. That’s just one of Google’s properties. Google is basically dominating the web.
Jur 8y ago
I don't know how it is for other countries outside the US, but in the Netherlands it doesn't add up at all. E.g. Russian social media site VK.com ranks #4 and another 5 Russian sites (in Cyrillic, which most Dutch people can't even read) decorate the top 20: https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/NL https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/NL
johan_larson 8y ago
How the heck is Yahoo still in the top 10?
Proven 8y ago
Reddit is a shit site just like FB. I am amazed it could get to #3 with such a terrible design (and I am talking about the less terrible old Reddit)
rakamotog 8y ago
Is it interesting that people spend the most time on Reddit than on every other website in the list? Even more than xVideos (which is #2)
slics 8y ago
Facebook no longer has the same purpose as it started. Reddit on the other hand it’s still true to its purpose. Free, open, and fun.
John_KZ 8y ago
Eh. Reddit's userbase is increasingly younger (have you seen the home page while logged out lately?) and they can't really monetize them. Sure, they have contracts with pizza and soda companies in the US, but that's it. Recently they've been trying to "Facebook-ize" their UX, they gather a lot more data, implement affiliate links and a lot more logging, but it's still not going far because the last of their adult users are leaving the site. At least this was my experience with Reddit in the past 2 years or so. I only go back to look for very specific things and leave afterwards.
sg7 8y ago
Isn’t Alexa traffic counted by its toolbar? So this is not really accurate data all. It only comes from people who have the toolbar installed. Which aren’t many. Facebook is still way more popular probably.
gsich 8y ago
Reddit on mobile browser is the worst experience one can have. A very big chunk of the screen is hidden with "get the app". You click on the mini text and the you need to scroll down to dismiss the bar. It has become similar with their new design, even on desktop platforms. "click here for old reddit or dismiss" and sometimes the old.reddit.com link has no underline with it, suggesting that a click there won't work.
rurban 8y ago
It also has by far the most daily pageviews per visitor, about 3x more then the top others (9.7 vs 2-3). Only xvideos.com the 2nd most popular adult site tops that, but close (10.56).
jhund 8y ago
I love the fact that I can consume reddit via RSS feed.
bane 8y ago
And yet, what's the relative valuations?
swami26 8y ago
This data does not take into account mobile app usage.
jxub 8y ago
An interesting part of it is the low number of references from outside sites. Reddit is amazing for concentric closed tribes with occasional ripple-like effects in the main page from some niche subreddits. Is this the real hivemind of a big chunk of mankind?
microcolonel 8y ago
How do they sort this? It is astonishing to me that they measure ~75% more time spent daily on Reddit.
chaolam 8y ago
How much of this is due to FB's migration to apps vs visits on the browser?
dobarsky 8y ago
reddit is way better than facebook, no obligations so to say

1361 points by Mahn 8y ago

The also have the highest "daily time on site" of all the sites on the list by a good amount. (15m vs 10+m for runner-up Facebook) That said, are these numbers reliable? And: Don't a lot of people visit FB via an app? I assume that's not counted here.

iamunr 8y ago
Same could be same for Reddit, and their app ecosystem.
- emn13 8y ago
  I can't say I'm enthused by reddit-on-mobile. I stick to the desktop version. No idea if I'm alone in that...
  - hoffbrau99 8y ago
    100% this
  - strig 8y ago
    Do you use the first-party app? It's probably the worst option out there.
  - nielsbot 8y ago
    Apollo on iOS is good IMO
  - foepys 8y ago
    https://i.reddit.com https://i.reddit.com is a good balance between app and the desktop website. A lot faster than m.reddit.com and supports the basic features of reading comments, commenting, and submitting. It also doesn't crash all the time and saves data.
  - zbuttram 8y ago
    There are some quality third-party clients on mobile. I like Apollo on iOS right now.
  - AlexandrB 8y ago
    Narwhal on iOS is pretty great. First-party reddit app is quite bad. Ironically reddit heavily pushes their official mobile app if you visit on mobile Safari.
    - thirdsun 8y ago
      These days Apollo seems to be the best reddit client on iOS: https://apolloapp.io/ https://apolloapp.io/
  - cornholio 8y ago
    Boost is great on Android.
- yurishimo 8y ago
  And the fact that Reddit has literally dozens of apps across all of the mobile platforms. Having a mostly open API gave 3rd party developers the opportunity to create better interfaces to draw users into using Reddit. When I first started using Reddit over 6 years ago, it was mostly desktop, but these days, probably 90% of my Reddit usage is mobile because I feel more productive (ironic) using a nicer interface with gesture support for voting and replying. I would bet that there are a million+ users primarily on 3rd party mobile apps around the world who, if not more.

hit8run 8y ago

Thx to Aaron.

soulchild37 8y ago
I am still sad about how corporate greed caused his death

tammer 8y ago

I've recently been thinking that Reddit holds a lot of potential that has yet to be tapped or expired. The recent pivots post CEO change (mobile app, redesign, crackdown on garbage) speak to a future where currently fractured private communities such as those on Discourse or Slack can find a more publicly accessible presence. Facebook Groups, while immensely popular, currently falls into the same opt-in, zero-discoverability category. The timing couldn't be better with the hollowing-out of Tumblr.

chipperyman573 8y ago
>The timing couldn't be better with the hollowing-out of Tumblr. What happened? I haven't heard about this.
- beanboot 8y ago
  Yeah I’d like to hear more about this “hollowing out.”
  - hoffbrau99 8y ago
    What's Tumblr?
- agentdrtran 8y ago
  recent redesign massively increased ads and "recommended posts" as well as many users/communities being banned for being NSFW.
falcon620 8y ago
Reddit is getting so much usage because it hasn't been monetized yet. At the moment it's quite good free user forum/board/discussion/community-style site. The new design will drive the users who liked that away. They will either eventually scatter away to hundreds of different places, or one or two new companies will take Reddit's current place.
- SquareWheel 8y ago

minimaxir 8y ago

Looking at Reddit data on BigQuery, the number of sitewide submissions has been growing steadily, despite the continual drama: https://i.imgur.com/V8AptYU.png https://i.imgur.com/V8AptYU.png Query to reproduce: #standardSQL SELECT TIMESTAMP_TRUNC(TIMESTAMP_SECONDS(created_utc), MONTH) as mon, COUNT(*) as num_submissions FROM `fh-bigquery.reddit_posts.*` WHERE (_TABLE_SUFFIX BETWEEN '2016_01' AND '2018_02' OR _TABLE_SUFFIX = 'full_corpus_201512') GROUP BY mon ORDER BY mon

wrinkl3 8y ago
The continual drama bothers only a relatively minor group of power users. A lot of newcomers to Reddit are casual submitters who neither know nor care about it.
- woah 8y ago
  I think the continual drama mostly bothers non reddit users and reporters
  - snarkyturtle 8y ago
    I haven't seen very negative coverage about the redesign, which I assume is what the "continual drama" is about.
  - sp527 8y ago
    No such thing as bad publicity. I'm listening to Pusha T even as I write this.
tmpz22 8y ago
I wonder if an increasing bot population is playing into this. If you believe the premise that "power users" are responsible for most content, and then notice content submissions are rising with user registrations, then that might suggest that either the paradigm has shifted or the content is fake.
- 8y ago

askafriend 8y ago

I didn't realize Quora was so incredibly dependent on search...even more so than Yelp.

nategri 8y ago

I admit after reading this headline I was scratching my head as to what #2 could be. And then I looked and it was super obvious haha.

aantix 8y ago
"You're Not Going to Believe Who is #2.."

zer0faith 8y ago

Now the NSA will collect data from Reddit.

falcon620 8y ago
And us foreigners will be asked for our Reddit usernames when we enter the US.
to_bpr 8y ago
>Now You'd have to be very naive to believe the intelligence agencies haven't been tapped into Reddit for a very long time already. If JTRIG is active on Flickr[0], you can be damned sure they're all over Reddit. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intelligence_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellig...

exelius 8y ago

Reddit works because it’s anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free. Change any one of those three and the user base will abandon you. It’s been Reddit’s dilemma since the beginning: you can’t monetize a toxic user base that has total freedom. Sure you can try to drive away the toxic users, but it turns out that those toxic users are also pretty influential in non-toxic aspects. I’m still skeptical of Reddit’s ability to turn a profit. But as a community platform it’s the best out there IMO.

falcon620 8y ago
Surely it should be possible to run something like Reddit at a profit? Run it with like 50 people. And not necessarily in SF. I think that's doable if you're happy with where the site is, product-wise. Just googled quickly and found a figure of 250 employees from last year.
- exelius 8y ago
  Right; if you run the Craigslist model. Reddit has been more interventionist with content, which means they need more people to manage the community. I would guess they have all the developers they need...
  - falcon620 8y ago
    I don't get the impression they are spending a whole lot on community management. In a way, that's a big part of what I see as their largest problem - they are relying on the zeal of the subreddit moderators to work for free. (They should have a model which allows moderators for large subreddits to get paid. And for the subscribers to vote for moderators.) This is why the large subreddits are so incredibly polarized in either left or right directions - the moderators are not paid to deal with things fairly, they are there spending their time working free - the only benefit they get is that they get to enforce their particular political choice onto others in their subreddit. Look at e.g. r/politics and r/the_donald as extreme examples of what I'm talking about.
    - 8y ago

midoreigh 8y ago

Reddit is going down.

dang 8y ago
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
- ahmetkun 8y ago
  After all, this isn't reddit, right? :)

synaesthesisx 8y ago

It blows my mind that Facebook is even top 5. Do people actually spend time on the site?

init-as 8y ago
They have over 200 million users in the US.. https://www.statista.com/statistics/398136/us-facebook-user-age-groups/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/398136/us-facebook-user-...
rconti 8y ago
Data point of 1: I use Facebook all the time and I think Reddit is terrible. Half the subreddits I see are toxic and the other half are people with 0 life experience. I have tried many times to derive value from it (much like Twitter, its advocates tell you you have to 'curate your feed') but no matter how much time I invest, I just can't make it work.
cm2012 8y ago
Dude, 50% of the american population uses Facebook every single day of their lives (according to FB's quarterly statements, which would be a serious crime to lie on).
- anonytrary 8y ago
  I think he was making a distinction between the app and the site. AFAIK, most Facebook users utilize Facebook primarily through the mobile app. If you look at Google trends[0] for Facebook, you'll notice a linear decline since 2011. I believe this is due to the onset of the Facebook mobile app, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. [0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=facebook https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=f...

jimmies 8y ago

I have recently created a software package and wanted a forum to have my users post "fun" stuff that is not strictly technical since it's sort of a hobby. I have decided that it is way too tedious to host my own forums, so I chose a middle ground that is to create a subreddit. It is working out pretty well. There are be several reasons that hosting a forum/fanclub on Reddit is better than on Facebook. Facebook mandates real name use, one username for everything that not everyone is comfortable with, I'm sure everyone on HN is already aware of that. But I think there is another subtle reason. In the past, I have relied on Facebook to host another hobbyist project, and it was super active. I thought what is more convenient than having one place to notify users about the ongoings and stuff and plus having a mobile app that kicks ass, right? It turned out, after a while, the group died. No one would interact with our news anymore, even when we don't spam them with junk news. I think the subtle reasons is that Facebook is way too aggressive on interaction. Maybe something exciting is happening and many people flock to comment on it, and so Facebook spams everyone with notifications and emails about the current ongoing that many of the users don't care about. If a user gets annoyed and decides to mute the group, then I will lose a good, caring person forever. Reddit has no such jealous nudging mechanism, the user has to explicitly check that subreddit to know. So the participation becomes much more passive and the user can choose to update about the ongoings at their own convenience. It turns out being more gentle for hobbyist groups wins over being aggressive. Not that I only have those two choices, though...

chaseha 8y ago
A lot of that may be due to the way Facebook has changed their algorithms in the last few years. I know that both Pages and Groups that don't pay for engagement have had huge issues with their content no longer showing up in follower's feeds. Could be that rather than users "ignoring" the group
djsumdog 8y ago
If you wanted to run one yourself, you could always setup a Lobsters instance.
jgh 8y ago
OTOH Reddit also enforces time as a limitation on posts, just on a slightly slower scale than Facebook. For example "necroposting" isn't really a thing that's possible with a Reddit (or HN) model. Nor are threads that are ongoing for months at a time, which are quite common on traditional forums. I mean you can do it but it has to be mod-sanctioned via pinning.

cwperkins 8y ago

Reddit is quickly becoming a tool for the majority on the site to suppress minority on the site's opinions. Until a viable solution is created to promote diversity of thought it will always suffer from this problem. Reddit is just as bad of an echo chamber as facebook. Please everyone who read stuff posted on reddit, engage in critical thinking after each article you read.

SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
When you say the majority vs the minority, what do you mean? edit: To Clarify, which groups are you labeling as such?
- cwperkins 8y ago
  It means different things in different contexts. For instance in r/southafrica there is a majority of Afrikaaners on the subreddit despite being a minority (10%) of the country. Any anti-Afrikaaner content is quickly dismissed and downvoted. In r/TwoXChromosome engaging in any discussion on the wage gap as a function of anything other than sexism is met with downvotes. In any majority US subreddit conservative posts may be dismissed and downvoted into oblivion. This tool of upvote/downvote is used to suppress non hive mind opinions on the site and I didn't necessarily mean this in the US specific context.
  - idoh 8y ago
    Well, there is quite a bit of free expression still. Anyone is empowered to make a subreddit and moderate how they please. What more do you want?
    - cwperkins 8y ago
      This lack of diversity of media/thought just propagates our current media landscape where people generally fall into 2 camps: Liberal sources (CNN/NBC/NYT) and then Fox viewers. With reddit there's a real opportunity to give readers a diversity of opinion, but in this upvote/downvote scheme usually the opposing opinion is buried so that it may never be seen. At least from my POV the thing reddit could improve from in this respect may be more of going into a HN type model by removing the downvote button.

cuddlypsycho 8y ago

Reddit has the illusion of anonymity which gives its users a false sense of privacy so they can act the way they truly are (parallels to Westworld if you watch the show). It would be incredibly easy for Reddit to de-anonymize its user base, the same way Facebook was trying to do with medical metadata, and sell that info (at least for the US users, given GDPR in EU now)

glorkk 8y ago

I’m really surprised Yahoo is #7, I thought Yahoo was all but dead.

wcfields 8y ago
Think of all the grandparents that have Win Vista / XP machines with IE defaulted to Yahoo. Also, all the spyware/malware/adware seems to be wrappers around a Yahoo search for some reason.
H1Supreme 8y ago
Yeah, this is very surprising. Even more surprising is how high Github and Stack Overflow are.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
canada_dry 8y ago
I've had my secondary email accts on yahoo for over 20 years, but am moving all the attached accts to another service. The moment Verizon bought them they immediately started spamming targeted ads based on the content of my email - so long, and thanks for all the fish yahoo!

ChrisArchitect 8y ago

tell me again how Alexa even gets this data these days? I mean ages ago it was thru sketchy browser addon toolbars etc, but seriously how many are installed now? Never really trusted their numbers

jakewins 8y ago
Same as how TV and Radio ratings are done - statistically significant sampling of the population via surveys: https://support.alexa.com/hc/en-us/articles/200449744-How-are-Alexa-s-traffic-rankings-determined- https://support.alexa.com/hc/en-us/articles/200449744-How-ar...
- cm2012 8y ago
  The global data panel is not surveys of a random population. It's data collected from people using Alexa toolbars. It's highly weighted towards desktop traffic and the kind of people who install toolbars.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

ThinkBeat 8y ago

Why is Yahoo so far up the list? Do they have anything good anymore?

ben174 8y ago
Mail, for one. People are very tied to their email address and don't like changing it.
- B0btheBuilder 8y ago
  I have three siblings and one parent still using Yahoo. The other parent uses Outlook. They just don't wanna deal with the hassle of moving to Gmail.

to_bpr 8y ago

As a long, long time user of Reddit, it has been quite saddening to see its descent into the shallow, ultra-toxic husk of a corporate entity that it is today. I'm not surprised by its popularity; it's a headline-surfers paradise, one in which you get feel good points for displays of virtue or shitposting easily digested content in an era of unparalleled narcissism and shortened attention spans. All is not lost though; as the steaming pile of defecation of the internet it serves effectively in attracting and distracting basically those who would otherwise pollute the greater internet community with their presence. So congrats, Reddit, I guess.

hoffbrau99 8y ago
I'd like a reddit-like site that is more exclusive, it filters out the non-serious users with a yearly subscription fee of say $100.
- tmpz22 8y ago
  Subscription filters might also filter out un-employed content producers who have free time to produce the quality content in the first place.
- curiousgal 8y ago
  Metafilter started with premise but it grew into something so obnoxious imo.
- heckanoobs 8y ago
  I've made reddit more enjoyable in the past by using plugins that auto collapse comments past depth 1 or 2. On avg, conversation devolves past that point. I've since quit Reddit but comments here have convinced me to take a second look. I think this time around I will put even more filters in place, like no subreddits with over 10k subs, and some way to hide everyone's karma count including my own. I guess what I'm trying to say is maybe you and I don't need a pay wall to filter, we just need an opinionated browser plugin (or easy way to share settings in RES)
- empath75 8y ago

cm2012 8y ago

Keep in mind: 1) Most Facebook users use the app, not the website, which Alexa doesn't track (Which is also why Facebook doesn't fear commonly used ad blockers). 2) Alexa uses a number of metrics to rank sites, including pages visited. Reddit users load many more individual pages than FB users. In reality, Reddit is nowhere near close to the traffic and engagement leviathan that is Facebook.

devy 8y ago
I agree. The amount of the network, data center engineering resources between facebook and reddit aren't even on the same magnitude.
- Vogtinator 8y ago
  That's not really comparable. Facebook needs much more computation while reddit is basically just a database full of text.
  - skeletonjelly 8y ago
    Each user has their own view of the frontpage though, which is computationally pretty expensive. Trees of comments similarly can get data heavy. Hard to compare IMO
bpicolo 8y ago
It's quite possible that Reddit has many more mobile users than desktop users, but I can't say whether the official app is the most-used of the bunch
kkarp 8y ago
plus a lot of Facebook users concerned about their privacy installed some third party script blockers. They are probably now below Alexa's radar
- baby 8y ago
  There's no way this amount to a significant number.

intrasight 8y ago

I avoided Reddit for many years - for no good reason mind you, I just didn't "get" it. Now I do and I am a big fan.

hoffbrau99 8y ago

Why did it take so long?

Alex3917 8y ago

Reddit’s year-over-year growth has been outrageous. A year ago I categorized each of the top 5,000 subredddits, and many of them have gained 10x the subscribers since then. For a website that’s been around for this long it’s absolutely unreal.

tim333 8y ago
Yeah congrats Spez.

u801e 8y ago

> Reddit works because it’s anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free. Change any one of those three and the user base will abandon you. Usenet meets all three criteria, but it definitely is not used nearly as much as it was in the past.

FrozenVoid 8y ago

Most of reddit content is facebook-tier entertaiment, I have to create a filter script to block thousands of irrelevant subreddits to increase signal-to-noise ratio. (filter script in question: http://void.wikidot.com/code:reddit-contentfilter-user-js http://void.wikidot.com/code:reddit-contentfilter-user-js )

Shank 8y ago

The biggest value gain from Reddit, to me, is the ability to centralize effectively around different hobbies and activities. In the past, if you wanted to find an online community for a movie or a game, you had to find a forum for that community. Finding forums that are well managed and capture a good segment of the community is hard -- and Reddit just becomes a default place to look now. Let's say a new TV show starts airing, and you really like it and want to discuss it more. You can probably bet there's a subreddit for it, and in that community, a ton of people interested in it. You can bet there are threads for discussing it in other parts of Reddit too. Worst case, you can make one yourself. This is something that everyone has in common. Everyone has a community they want to "be apart of" and Reddit lets you express yourself to those communities without having an identity tied to that community. There are groups on Facebook, but it's so tied to you that it's hard to just be a part of a community. On Twitter, people tend to congregate around others in their interest domain, but by default, all posts go everywhere. Someone into a show on Twitter is going to dilute their feed and have a similarly diluted feed if they discuss it. In contrast, a subreddit is a concentrated mass of people around a topic. I don't really get much value outside of this centralization. The default subreddits are too general for my taste, so I don't subscribe to many. But for the 80-90 different topics and communities I like to see, it's great.

slivym 8y ago
I think the flip side to this is that the communities are becoming so large now that they aren't really a community. I sometimes go on the /r/UK and the level of discussion gets lower and lower as the community dissolves. Rather than getting to know people everyone is just shouting into the void - unaware of who anyone else is.
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  I think this is more associated with the fact that all communities (real communities) are small. Try a more focused interest group. /r/pathology, for example, is only a few thousand folks, mainly people working at the graduate or post-doctoral level.

DonHopkins 8y ago

What surprises me is now far down PornHub is on the list. Reddit way sticker than PornHub!

beauzero 8y ago

Unfortunately they may think that it was because of the redesign. joking, joking, well kind of. yeah, no, the redesign is awful...still.

trisimix 8y ago

Just as reddit is losing its charm to me...

myth_buster 8y ago

Wow, the _Daily Time on Site_ is the best in top 50. I've always felt they sold early.

rc-1140 8y ago

Reddit has always been a strange place to me, even as it has grown to be a cornerstone of socialization on the internet. I didn't grow up with it, I'm still not a huge fan of the layout even after the redesign, the way comments work still annoys me, and there are still plenty of stereotypical Reddit users that I do not want to associate or be associated with. However, I can no longer deny that it serves no purpose or that it is arbitrarily bad: it has a bevy of information I simply can't get anywhere else, "everyone" uses it in some manner so it's not an unknown in conversation, and it's got plenty of niche communities that might appeal to my interests. In the process, it's eaten up all sorts of one-off forums and communities that don't wave the Reddit flag because it's just way easier to make a Reddit board for your interest/community. Reddit also doesn't have cute features like emoticons, their markdown isn't as intuitive as BBCode tags to me, and the versatility of a given Reddit board is limited to what can be done with CSS and each board's Wiki. Files have to be hosted elsewhere (game mods, game recordings via SourceTV and similar, etc.), though this isn't anywhere near as big of a deal as I'm making it. Am I joining the e-Dinosaur ranks?

agentdrtran 8y ago
Restricting CSS and wikis to be standardized is fantastic - it means that mobile users and desktop users might actually get to see the same subreddit.
- rc-1140 8y ago
  For my interests, I guess I can't see the value in a mobile user; maybe in some really one-off cases in my interests it would be prudent for a unified view? The most I've seen a Reddit board do is have fancier sidebar links. My thoughts when it comes to having differentiated Reddits are forum-like features such as shoutboxes, hyper-specific file uploads, or even flat-out disabling Karma on that board (dunno if that one is already possible). Sure I can have a forum with all of these features, but not the ease of use or traffic that Reddit gets. Like I hope I got across in my previous post, still undecided and hesitant on Reddit as a whole, even to this day.
  - 8y ago

IronWolve 8y ago

Newsgroups took a dive when people moved to web forums, scattered all around the web. Now people are moving back to a centralized website, reddit, that's interestingly almost like reading newsgroup threads. Always thought the biggest problem with forums, not feeding RSS feeds back into newsgroups to keep it alive. But then, you couldn't reply, and was only for archival purposes. At least with Reddit, I can use ifttt to push content into reddit, and make the discussion happen on reddit, in dedicated subs.

Matachines 8y ago

What surprises be about reddit is that they get advertisers and ads while having one of the largest porn communities. No one talks about this, and people are quick to say "Tumblr/4chan is just porn!", but not only is there a myriad of porn subreddits, many of them have OC content (people posting themselves), who thanks to reddit's new profile followers feature have a fanbase. One only needs to look at /r/sexsells (NSFW) to see this in action. With the shutdown of Craigslist personals, people are (using and have been using) reddit for hookups as well. Crazy that they "get away" with the #1 killer of social media platform ad revenue.

jonlucc 8y ago
I suspect this is due to a firewall between the types of content. I don't remember what interview I was listening to years ago, but I think it was Matt Cutts who said that Google has a whole porn team that makes sure that when you want porn, you get the most relevant porn sites and when you don't want porn, you get none. I think Reddit is in the same boat. People don't avoid Google ads because they might end up on porn; in fact, lots of products only want to be placed next to porn.
manfredo 8y ago
If my understanding is correct, subreddits that host NSFW material (or at least, a substantial amount of it) get tagged and age gated. I imagine it's pretty easy to let advertisers opt out of those areas.
- bruhbruhbruh 8y ago
  That is correct. Advertisers target specific subreddits and/or "interest groups". No NSFW advertisements should appear in safe-for-work communities. https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/advertising/advertising-101/frequently-asked-questions https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/advertising/adverti... What are age-gated subreddits? Age-gated subreddits are those that are listed as NSFW(18+). We ask that advertisers advertising adult-related products/services focus their targeting on these subreddits to ensure we are serving ads to the appropriate audience.
- 8y ago

_seemethere 8y ago

Why doesn't reddit try to roll out an enterprise product? I'm sure a lot of companies would be willing to pay to have an interface like reddit internally. Most current solutions for this problem aren't very good and I feel like reddit could be a good alternative. (not the redesign though, loading times on that would make it basically unusable)

rnet85 8y ago
Doesn't stackexchange enterprise already fill that niche?
- CM30 8y ago
  Does Stackexchange enterprise let users create sites/subreddits?
exelius 8y ago
I feel a subreddit is a good solution when you need to have a discussion with over 1,000 people. That’s an arbitrary number, but it’s the point at which personal relationships break down and it becomes a “flat” discussion. I don’t think Reddit is a very good way to push say, an HR policy to a bunch of branch offices. There are better tools for that job (including Facebook’s corporate offerings).
RandallBrown 8y ago
About 6 years ago we had a self hosted reddit that someone hacked to hook in to our ActiveDirectory. It's the best QA/Wiki/Group communication tool I've ever used at a company. I've thought a few times that you could build a startup on selling a modified version of open source reddit to enterprises. (Not sure how much of reddit is open source anymore though.)
- usmannk 8y ago
  How does this solution compare to, say, Slack in your experience?

echelon 8y ago

Anyone interested in building an open source, add-free, Creative Commons-licensed (perhaps not the posts as these belong to users, but the posts in aggregate) copy of Reddit? My ideal "Reddit" more closely follows the freedoms of Wikipedia / FOSS. Reddit currently allows 3rd party clients to have access, but I envision more - an analytics API, ML tools to train your own consumption / discovery agent about what you like, filter out noise (including comments!), etc. Reddit functioned with a skeleton crew for awhile. A small team could subsist on donations and build something for the public good. Something community owned and operated could be of tremendous value, and we wouldn't worry so much over its uncertain future. Federation could even be built in...

lightyrs 8y ago
The federation aspect is very interesting to me. Can you describe in more detail?
- echelon 8y ago
  I imagine it would be similar to Mastodon, but instead of people being on a node, you'd have communities on a node. One server might focus on the southeast, eg. /r/atlanta, /r/georgia, /r/falcons, etc. Another might focus on gaming, hosting subtopics such as /r/nintendo, /r/minecraft, /r/ps4, etc. If you're on one machine, you can have it pull in discussions from other nodes. Or your client software might do that automatically for you. Nodes might agree on a common short form namespace to refer to different communities, and we might even be able to bolt this on to existing systems, eg. /r/me_irl is Reddit, whereas /hn/show is "Show Hacker News". It doesn't necessarily have to be backwards-compatible with non-fedarated systems, but it could be. I imagine single sign on, and good APIs for ingesting another community's or user's content. Ranking metadata can also be supplied by the host community, but local communities or individuals can apply their own transformative equations on top of them.
  - iN7h33nD 8y ago
    I was just thinking of something exactly like this. I started my own nas in my basement using yunohost and I really think self hosting on old hardware and federation could finally help decentralize the internet.

danso 8y ago

So this doesn't account for mobile native app usage, right? My impression is that mobile accounts for the vast majority of Facebook users. In the 2018 Q1 earnings report, FB saiid that 91% of its ad revenue came from mobile: https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2018/Facebook-Reports-First-Quarter-2018-Results/default.aspx https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

NullPrefix 8y ago
Because adblock is not available for apps?

_raoulcousins 8y ago

I've never heard of diply or providr. Everything else on the top 50 I'm at least aware of.

RandallBrown 8y ago
Diply is one of those horrible list aggregator websites. I see ads for it on facebook constantly. Generally it's just a list of 10 things from an AskReddit thread.

moultano 8y ago

Facebook's app is popular. Reddit's app isn't.

isarac 8y ago

And it shows. What's the new website to go to?

toephu2 8y ago

Anyone know what reddit's DAU is? They used to publish this publicly (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic) but since trying to become a real business and monetize they have since taken that down. edit: I see from https://web.archive.org/web/20170507102752/https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic https://web.archive.org/web/20170507102752/https://www.reddi... on 2017/5/1 they hit 1M DAU.

tromp 8y ago

The Alexa statistics look suspect in some countries. The top 10 most popular websites in the Netherlands [1] includes 3 Russian websites, with Vk.com at #4. [1] https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/NL https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/NL

jackmodern 8y ago

Love reddit. Don't understand why it took this long to pass FB.

iblaine 8y ago

But which site gets more traffic from Russian bots, facebook or reddit?

HeavyStorm 8y ago

Side effect of people migrating to Facebook Mobile while reddit is still more popular on desktops? On Google's Play Store, Facebook is said to have 76 million users. Reddit has only 630k users.

chiefalchemist 8y ago

No disrespect to Reddit, but that's __a lot__ of visitors + page views for what a fair percentage of the population might not be aware of (in a FB, etc. sort of way). Maybe I'm not questioning Reddit's "fame" per se, but the validity of the algorithm that puts them at #3. Perhaps it's just me?

z3t4 8y ago

Reading Reddit is like reading an article in a newspaper on a subject you are well versed in ... Then you read about something you know nothing about - while having the ability to upvote/downvote, and happily vote, even if you are not really qualified, and have now forgotten that the facts are probably backwards or wrong.

BadassFractal 8y ago

Reddit is super valuable from the perspective of being able to poll a "hive mind" specialized in a certain thing about best practices and ideas. e.g. I want to learn more about making EDM, more about photography, more about shibari etc. Usually the advice is pretty decent between beginner and intermediate level, for the high end super-custom guidance usually it falls flat.

camelCaseOfBeer 8y ago

Funny how the figure is ultimately inversely proportional to quality of content. Sites begin wanting great content so they can end by attracting the users who make awful content.

tomc1985 8y ago

That's crazy how Yahoo is at #7 and is widely considered a failure

mastazi 8y ago

And according to the same link Reddit is first in terms of daily time on site, which apparently is extremely valuable in the ads world.

Iggyjay 8y ago

This is less about reddits sudden greatness and more about the canis familiaris that faceache have been fornicating

paulsutter 8y ago

Alexa ratings are based on people who run the Alexa toolbar. Which is dominated by webmaster types who care about Alexa. Who are more likely to be redditors than the average user.

O1111OOO 8y ago

The sourced link states that Facebook as 7,127,042 sites that link to it. Seems excessive. I often find sites linking to Amazon (824,044), Youtube (2,722,482), Wikipedia (1,928,776), Imgur (172,079) but rarely to Facebook. Maybe this has to do with Facebook's plugin/commenting system that tracks across the web(?). Possibly social networks cross-supporting eachother, that is... twitter (5,421,978) linking to Facebook and vice versa.

dynofuz 8y ago

What does it mean by popularity? Number of visitors? Number of visitors x time spent on site?

rblion 8y ago

I don't use FB at all, IG once or twice a week, SC a few times a months when I eat out nice or do something super cool worth sharing. I use reddit every day and sometimes night. Favorite website of all-time.

erd0s 8y ago

More surprising is that yahoo is #7! I might be out of touch but I can’t think of a single person that uses yahoo, maybe it might be the default homepage on my grandmas computer...

gnulinux 8y ago
I've never seen anyone who used Yahoo too. I've seen one or two people who used Bing and even Yandex (lol) but no Yahoo.

massysett 8y ago

Says more about the stagnation of the Web than the rise of Reddit or the fall of Facebook. Facebook has market-leading apps. People are getting their Facebook through apps, not Web. Meanwhile, until very recently Reddit's app was a joke.

pwaai 8y ago

Well reddit is pretty much the only site that I compulsively check. I no longer care about Facebook. Actually I prefer anonymous reddit users more.

methodover 8y ago

Reddit frightens me way more than Facebook ever did. Reddit gives the impression of what ideas are popular with its rating and comment system. But those systems are remarkably easy to manipulate. Imagine a Russian troll farm operation making a certain favored candidate look far more popular than he is, for example. Or a corporation rallying fake support around a piece of legislation. Sock puppetry on an industrial scale could pose a serious threat to our democracy. Reddit needs to figure out how they could mitigate that threat.

igammarays 8y ago

I gave up on Reddit a while ago because it is such a massive time-sink. Kills productivity like no other. Atleast Twitter is short and digestible. Reddit can eat entire days. But now I want to come back and see if I can strike a balance. Can anyone recommend great focused subreddits to keep my frontpage junktainment-free?

fwn 8y ago
Your frontpage is junkfree after you unfollowed all the defaults and blocked the ads. After that, it's literally empty. Now follow subs on topics you are interested in. I do it that way and I only have to unfollow in very few cases due to a lack of moderation or an usergrowth that brings in the masses. I also avoid threads that get discovered by an audience beyond the initial subreddit it was posted in. That's easy to notice as conversation immediately stops and mindless chain commenters make karma rain over each other.

beedogs 8y ago

Reddit's also become the #1 white nationalist site on the Internet. And the admins don't seem to care. Shut it down.

mastrsushi 8y ago

The initial idea of Facebook is great. I can't exactly knock it when this site is heavily influenced. But the problem with having specific boards that satisfy every little interest is that an echo chamber effect often occurs. My karma on that site is so low, not because of trolling, but speaking my own opposing views. I'll never be able to post on a FreeBSD subreddit, claiming a specific case where I find Linux better suited. Or when I read the OpenBSD mailing list and post that Theo De Raadt needs to get a grip, when he rejects Rust because no core utilities have been implemented. Making points that radical are just asking for trouble. It's a great way to collaborate with people within the same niche, but it's a clique. They only want to hear themselves talk. Believe it or not, despite 4chan's well known toxicity, boards like /g/, /adv/, and /mu/ are perfect examples of true anomity. Where specific interests are shared within threads of each board. They may come off harsh to the light hearted, but they're not afraid of opinions.

steveklabnik 8y ago
Side note, my understanding is not that OpenBSD rejects Rust due to "no core utilities have been implemented", but because it cannot bootstrap from a C compiler alone.
- mastrsushi 8y ago
  Do you have a link to that? So much for self-hosting.
  - steveklabnik 8y ago
    What do you mean? Rust is self-hosting; that’s exactly the issue. It’s written in Rust.

TekMol 8y ago

I wonder how much traction a lightweight Reddit with a nice clean html interface would get. Something like HN but with unlimited categories, not just all/show/ask. I would love such a thing. For me, Reddit already was on the edge of being too bloated before the redesign. Now I barely use it anymore. Before the redesign, I was on HN like 10 times a day and on Reddit 5 times a day or so. Now I use Reddit maybe once a day. And I always have this 'Uh oh this is going to be annoying. Do I really want to check it?' feeling.

newman8r 8y ago
I think you need a pretty significant community size to make the 'subreddit' model work. It's kind of a 'chicken or the egg' problem. I believe reddit didn't even offer subreddits initially.
- TekMol 8y ago
  Maybe. Then starting with just a few categories and slowly adding more might be a good approach.
  - gnulinux 8y ago
    You mean like 4chan? Also you can make your own reddit client, it has a pretty open API. So, you can make your own reddit client looking like HN.

codeismylife 8y ago

It's strange to see GitHub so high up there. I wouldn't have thought it plausible.

bad_user 8y ago

What’s interesting to me is that YouTube is more popular than Facebook. I realize that Facebook gets used a lot on mobile phones and that overall it’s probably more popular. But it’s still incredible that YouTube.com is more popular than Facebook.com. That’s just one of Google’s properties. Google is basically dominating the web.

Jur 8y ago

I don't know how it is for other countries outside the US, but in the Netherlands it doesn't add up at all. E.g. Russian social media site VK.com ranks #4 and another 5 Russian sites (in Cyrillic, which most Dutch people can't even read) decorate the top 20: https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/NL https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/NL

johan_larson 8y ago

How the heck is Yahoo still in the top 10?

Proven 8y ago

Reddit is a shit site just like FB. I am amazed it could get to #3 with such a terrible design (and I am talking about the less terrible old Reddit)

rakamotog 8y ago

Is it interesting that people spend the most time on Reddit than on every other website in the list? Even more than xVideos (which is #2)

slics 8y ago

Facebook no longer has the same purpose as it started. Reddit on the other hand it’s still true to its purpose. Free, open, and fun.

John_KZ 8y ago

Eh. Reddit's userbase is increasingly younger (have you seen the home page while logged out lately?) and they can't really monetize them. Sure, they have contracts with pizza and soda companies in the US, but that's it. Recently they've been trying to "Facebook-ize" their UX, they gather a lot more data, implement affiliate links and a lot more logging, but it's still not going far because the last of their adult users are leaving the site. At least this was my experience with Reddit in the past 2 years or so. I only go back to look for very specific things and leave afterwards.

sg7 8y ago

Isn’t Alexa traffic counted by its toolbar? So this is not really accurate data all. It only comes from people who have the toolbar installed. Which aren’t many. Facebook is still way more popular probably.

gsich 8y ago

Reddit on mobile browser is the worst experience one can have. A very big chunk of the screen is hidden with "get the app". You click on the mini text and the you need to scroll down to dismiss the bar. It has become similar with their new design, even on desktop platforms. "click here for old reddit or dismiss" and sometimes the old.reddit.com link has no underline with it, suggesting that a click there won't work.

rurban 8y ago

It also has by far the most daily pageviews per visitor, about 3x more then the top others (9.7 vs 2-3). Only xvideos.com the 2nd most popular adult site tops that, but close (10.56).

jhund 8y ago

I love the fact that I can consume reddit via RSS feed.

bane 8y ago

And yet, what's the relative valuations?

swami26 8y ago

This data does not take into account mobile app usage.

jxub 8y ago

An interesting part of it is the low number of references from outside sites. Reddit is amazing for concentric closed tribes with occasional ripple-like effects in the main page from some niche subreddits. Is this the real hivemind of a big chunk of mankind?

microcolonel 8y ago

How do they sort this? It is astonishing to me that they measure ~75% more time spent daily on Reddit.

chaolam 8y ago

How much of this is due to FB's migration to apps vs visits on the browser?

dobarsky 8y ago

reddit is way better than facebook, no obligations so to say