
Reddit is Growing Slowly, but Surely - minimaxir
http://minimaxir.com/2013/11/daily-reddit/
======
gabemart
I'd be cautious of using number of submissions as a metric for growth. It's
possible that at least some of the growth in the number of submissions is
caused by an increase in the ratio of spam.

In fact, a growing number of submissions can be a problem for a social news
aggregator. Is it fair to assume that curation capacity will scale linearly
with submission quantity? Perhaps not. Even if a linear growth in submissions
represents a scaled growth in visitors and user accounts, curation capacity
will only scale if new user accounts have the same curation appetite as older
user accounts.

If you get lots of new submissions and lots of new visitors but a smaller
number of new people voting on submissions, average quality of front-page
material will suffer. It's possible there will be a positive feedback effect
if older users with a higher appetite for curating content are more sensitive
to a decline in quality and thus more likely to leave the site, exacerbating
the problem.

When a social news site is young and small, (non-spam) submissions are a Good
Thing. But as a user-driven site matures, it's much more valuable to have
better submissions rather than more submissions.

I hypothesize that one solution to the seemingly inevitable decline in quality
of large social sharing sites is to introduce a cost to posting new content. A
trivial example would be scaling the minimum time between submissions to the
user's karma for previous submissions. (For this to work without incentivizing
spam via sock puppets, there would have to be heavy restrictions on posting
content for new users.) The time-between-submissions could be large for less
proven accounts - think days rather than minutes.

There are problems with this approach, but they may be better problems to have
than the alternative.

~~~
shiftpgdn
I run a small subreddit with about 4k subscribers and I think you're onto
something. The amount of spam that beats the spam filter feels absolutely
overwhelming sometimes.

Even with self posts only enabled there is still a crushing amount of spam
submitted daily.

~~~
nols
I'm not seeing that at all, I run a few subs over 10K users and I'm not seeing
much spam at all.

~~~
shiftpgdn
What are your subs targeted at though?

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jedberg
It's not like reddit's traffic is a secret. When I worked there, we had no
trouble sharing our uniques and pageviews, it is still the same today. Just
ask them.

And for the record, the traffic doubles about once every 18 months. The
pageviews double about once every 14 months (so slightly faster then user
growth).

In fact, the traffic is right here:

[http://www.reddit.com/about](http://www.reddit.com/about)

~~~
simcop2387
Another great source for this kind of data and analysis of the site has been
TheoryOfReddit[1]. Along with traffic data, there are people doing network
analysis of all kinds between the groups on there, and even comment analysis.

[1]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit](http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit)

~~~
jedberg
Be careful though, those folks are wrong more often then they are right. I've
tried to point out their mistakes in the past, but they usually just accused
me of trying to be deceptive, so I gave up.

~~~
simcop2387
That wouldn't surprise me too much about some of them. The only ones that I'd
really read are the ones that are actually releasing the data they got on it
all, which is still a fair bit of them. That said, there is still a large
amount of speculation going on there.

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buckbova
I love the freedom of the platform. Create any subreddit you like. Moderate it
anyway you like. Upvote what you want to see downvote those with no value.

But, as with digg, I couldn't have reasonable discussions there. It was always
a flamewar or an attack by the hivemind. Then there is the memes. Too too many
on nearly every board. Don't get me started on rage comics.

~~~
vinkelhake
The greatness of Reddit is indeed in the subreddits.

Just curious, which subreddits did you try to have reasonable discussions in?
The ones I find myself in are moderated efficiently and there's not a trace of
memes or rage comics.

~~~
DanBC
Look at Minecraft - the regular /r/minecraft has active moderation, but
threads are full of up-voted low quality comments. /r/trueminecraft should be
better, and the submissions are great but there's very little discussion
there.

~~~
criley2
Sorry, but /r/minecraft targets tweens and kids. Yes, a subreddit primarily
frequented by 8-15 year olds is going to appear "non-academic".

Even subreddits like /r/feedthebeast, which has become the de-facto modded
minecraft subreddit (for Forge flavors, at least) host much higher quality
discussions and content and have almost no memes/jokes upvoted.

But again, that's probably because the FTB subreddit has less overall
subscribers (less incentive to post for karma, as there are less potential
viewers to reward you) as well as an average higher age of the users.

~~~
idProQuo
> But again, that's probably because the FTB subreddit has less overall
> subscribers (less incentive to post for karma, as there are less potential
> viewers to reward you)

Hold up, you might be on to something. What if reddit divided karma received
by the number of subscribers in the sub where something was posted? They'd
need to then multiply it by some constant multiplier or something, there'd be
some details to tweak, but that might do a lot to mitigate the problem of
subreddits getting crappier as they get more popular.

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milhous
I signed up to reddit a few months ago and found it great for local events and
meetups, with little interest and time for memes or browsing the main page. I
could see it as a competitor to Craigslist, meetup.com, and others. Very
versatile site.

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kin
Does anyone see subreddits making forums obsolete?

~~~
dublinben
Maybe in some cases, but not when the pace of conversation is slower. Reddit
locks threads after a few months, and anything beyond the latest 100
submissions is pretty much gone.

~~~
TillE
That's optimistic. In even a lightly active subreddit, posts disappear after
about 48 hours.

Stickies kinda solve part of the problem, but Reddit's comment system is
entirely unsuitable for ongoing discussions. I'm not sure traditional forums
are the best we can do either, but Reddit is certainly worse.

~~~
dublinben
You're totally right. Reddit is terrible for any kind of ongoing discussion.

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kristopher
I wonder how the number of daily submissions were tabulated.

If reddit were using an ID based on some sort of fixed constant (for example
time) then these results could be in-fact fairly linear.

Please note that I do believe that reddit is growing!

~~~
minimaxir
Reddit has an endpoint where you can download all submissions. (however, due
to the API limit of 100 submissions / 2 seconds, it took me about 1.5-2 months
to get the 41 million submissions)

~~~
marketforlemmas
Have you looked at number of comments instead of number of submissions? That
would seem to be a better estimator of user growth.

Honestly, I don't think that estimating number of submissions is a very good
metric for the growth of Reddit (or Hackernews). If you want some proxy for
its influence, you care about readership more than anything else. This thread
[1] on Reddit (and the references therein) shows that 50% of Reddit activity
comes from users that aren't even logged in. So even if you were just able to
measure logged in users (which would still be a far greater number than
submissions), you would still only estimate half the influence.

[1]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1khp85/logge...](http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1khp85/logged_out_users_account_for_50_of_reddits_traffic/)

~~~
jedberg
Wouldn't it be easier to just look at the public traffic information at
[http://www.reddit.com/about](http://www.reddit.com/about) ?

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rpsw
Submissions is only a small piece of the puzzle. The number of active
commenter's and even the number of consumer-only are quite important measures
to get an accurate picture of growth.

In a community there can be small core of active submitters, but there could
also be a large number of passive users clicking ads. Someone might never have
made a submission, but could have given or received gold, as well.

~~~
001sky
Helpful tip to for author/analysis might be to add some components of velocity
or acceleration. Submissions seems akin to a 'mass' but what one is trying to
understand is 'energy', and this feels too one-dimensional IMHO.

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thatthatis
They went from just under 30k submissions a day to just under 80k submissions
a day in 2 years. That's 166% growth in 2 years. That's not "slowly"

Further, you'd expect growth of submissions in a "best rise to the top" system
to be lower that growth of overall use.

A traffic chart, or a chart of the total number of votes (not just upvotes)
would be a far better estimate of their true growth.

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dxm
Reddit went all out with April fools day in 2013, they pitted users against
each other (Periwinkle vs. Orangered) which is likely the spike in submissions
compared with other years.

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dpatrick86
Number of participants in secret santa might be a nice metric to throw in with
the growth metrics too.

