So I just simply compared the top posts of lemmy r/all and reddits r/all. Currently this month’s top 5 r/all posts are somewhere between 228k - 142k upvotes, while lemmy’s are between 2.2k and 1.7k.
The monthly active user count of reddit is over a billion, while that of lemmy is 1.2 million. If we just compare them by these metrics, reddit has 1000x the users but 100x engagement. And this also held true when I compared the meme subreddits using the same metric, but news subreddit was an outlier where the subscriber to upvote ratio was equal between them.
It’s extremely crude calculation, but since I observed this pattern, I felt I need to share this somewhere. What I feel is that as social media platform gets larger, the number of lurkers, people who don’t engage, increase. could there be any other reason?
It could be bots. Have you noticed google searches inserting “reddit (search term)” in your search suggestions?
Google’s crawlbots alone are constantly scanning your answers in reddit to feed their algorithm.
That’s just one search company, not including search rivals like MS/Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.
Also AI bastards crawling all over reddit to feed their training databases.
When you put it that way, bots sound like a reasonable answer. But would crawlbots actually prop up monthly active users that much? I thought it might be like 10%.