
Ask HN: Is Reddit's popularity real? - curiousjane
Looking at wikipedia&#x27;s list of top sites on the internet they are currently<p><pre><code>    1.  Google
    2.  Youtube
    3.  Facebook
    4.  Baidu
    5.  Wikipedia
    6.  Reddit
    7.  Yahoo!
    8.  Tencent QQ
    9.  Taobao
    10. Google India
    11. TMall
    12. Amazon
    13. Twitter
    14. Sohu
    15. Instagram
</code></pre>
Looking around me pretty much everyone I know uses Google and Youtube. Most people I know use Facebook. People reference Wikipedia often. I don&#x27;t personally do Twitter but I see references do it many times a day.<p>But, Reddit? No one I know uses Reddit. Not a single person. If I look around at people&#x27;s laptops I&#x27;ll see people on Google and Facebook and Youtube. I&#x27;ve never seen a single person on Reddit. I never see people posting references to stuff on Reddit, where as I see tons of references to Twitter. Youtube probably also benefits in that every embedded iframe video on non-youtube sites counts as a hit on Youtube but Reddit has no embedding AFAIK so it can&#x27;t get that added to its stats.<p>I get often told Reddit is a great place to discuss many topics but anytime I go I never find any real discussion. The Unity forum is dead compared to pretty much another other Unity resource. Several other programming sub reddits get almost no traffic or only a low amount of inexperienced dev traffic. The top 10 most popular podcasts in the USA get almost no discussion. The number of comments on top topics is impressive but it&#x27;s no more than articles on popular news papers that haven&#x27;t banned comments.<p>All this is the long way of saying something smells fishy. It just doesn&#x27;t seem like it&#x27;s possible for Reddit to be in the same class as the other sites on that list based on all the easily observable evidence.<p>Is Reddit really as big as people say it is or is it really several orders of magnitude less and something else is going on to make it appear more popular than it actually is?
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tomhoward
Measuring website popularity is an inexact science. Its accuracy depends both
on what you measure (number of users? number of page views? number of visits?,
number of minutes spent?), your methods of measurement (e.g, proxy metadata
from ISPs, user-installed browser toolbars) and their accuracy.

You'll see on that Wikipedia page that Reddit's ranking is vastly different
between Alexa (6) and SimilarWeb (23). This would be due to differences in the
calculation method and the accuracy of data collection.

That said, I still think Reddit may be more popular than you realise.

I also don't know many people who use it much, but I know the people who use
it, use it a lot.

According to this survey [1], 70% of its users are under 25, so if you don't
know many people in their early 20s and younger, its popularity won't be so
visible to you.

[1] [https://imgur.com/gallery/cPzlB](https://imgur.com/gallery/cPzlB)

