SimilarWeb has just released traffic estimates for June. According to these estimates, Reddit’s traffic has seen a 3.36% month-over-month decrease.
For comparison, here’s how traffic has changed for other popular social networking websites:
- Discord.com: +0.51%
- Twitter.com: -1.65%
- Instagram.com: -1.35%
- Facebook.com: -3.18%
- TikTok.com: +0.77%
- Pinterest.com: -2.27%
- Youtube.com: -2.02%
Source: https://www.similarweb.com/website/reddit.com/#overview
While I wouldn’t put bots past the reddit staff (they do so little about astro-turfing that it’s hard to imagine they’re opposed to it), they’re not the only ones with something to lose.
Reactionaries and extremists have worked very hard to build “mask on” communities that aren’t overtly far-right but are nevertheless an important stepping stone on the way there.
I’m sure they don’t want to start over again on a new platform that is much more difficult to manipulate.
Yeah that’s a good point. Some of the scammer bots were so easy to spot and even easier to automate that spotting while they were stealing comments to build karma for credibility/posting in subs that required a minimum karma that I wondered why they even still existed. The answer is some variation of Reddit didn’t care to stop them, the only question was if it was based on resources, apathy, or corruption.
Those last two are less likely here. With it being open source, there’s a lot of ambition to go around, so even when the main devs get tired of it, others can come and fill in the parts that are important to them. Corruption can’t be too blatant or the corrupted ones will be cut out of the equation, which means even the scammers and propagandists will need to temper themselves even if they find something that works well for a while because anything too blatant will get noticed and dealt with.