this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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It's still insanely popular.
I don't know about "insanely".
It's not in the top 10 globally. It gets less traffic than Yahoo or Yandex.
https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/
Compared to other social media it's below Facebook, Instagram and even the dying Twitter. It might get more traffic than TikTok (which seems off to me) but unlike Reddit and Twitter, TikTok knows how to make money. Reddit has never made money, but the pitch to investors is apparently "as soon as we go public, we'll be in the black, trust me bro".
Yandex is not that popular in the United States, their data collection seems wrong. Semrush ranks reddit #3 in the US.
More traffic than Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Amazon, etc? That seems unlikely. Maybe they're not counting any traffic from apps? If so, that isn't all that useful.
These statistics are only as good as their method of data collection.
I recently started using it because it's actually a search engine like Google used to be. I wouldn't be surprised to hear it's gaining traction. Google.com is just a website. I don't think they realize just how quickly we can switch to other providers.
Yes, but why?
There are still a lot of smaller subreddits of rather niche communities that you just don't have here on Lemmy for example
That whole "niche communities" thing never rang true for me. I mean sure, if you like cast iron you can go to the cast iron community. And see 9000 pictures of cast iron pans and people freaking out about cast iron. Or cooking... and you have to listen to THOUSANDS of recommendations for air fryers but not cooking.
The "communities" system never worked from the word go. The site content should have been organized with weighted tags. As I find few things more nauseating than "collective intelligence" which is mostly wrong, ill-conceived, closed-minded and half-baked at best.
I mean at least for video games especially ones that are live service games having a place to go to talk about the game and new changes is really nice and still a thing I miss a lot about Reddit.
Disagree, there were, possibly still are, good ones. A handful around mushrooms cultivation, food preserving, food fermentation and personal finance specific to my country come to mind, lots of high quality content.
But I know what you mean. I think it mainly happens once specific subreddits started going mainstream, often with an influxnl from facebook people. Out of all the fermented stuff, the kombucha one made my eyes bleed due to its popularity. Half the posts where new people asking if they had a mold problem, the other half was existing members posting "read this before posting, this is what mold looks like", but they were obviously ignored lol
In principle, I agree with you. But you are judging Reddit's value by the looking at the home page and taking a snapshot. Instead of looking at it as a lake of mostly crap, think of it as Instead of a river that filters things out and holds the not-crap that come from the flood.
For the same reasons that fast food is popular. It's basically dumbed down mindless consumption. I used to be on reddit because I could talk to like-minded people about interesting topics, but the vast majority of people on the internet just want to be entertained and with the support of the admins, they ended up taking over the site. Sure, there are some niche communities where you can have valuable discussions but their time is limited. It's essentially an artificially accelerated Eternal September.
I'm on board with your main point. I supposed I'm still left wondering why people go to a place that gives them the exact same thing every day without variation. Wait... yeah... that's actually the appeal. It is just like fast food: sweet, salty, fatty, devoid of nutrition, and always predictable.