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(edit: no it’s 40k. It’s looking even worse for reddit). 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?


One of the weirder information I found. The website seems to have quoted semrush here, so idk, but monthly unique users from America is more than America’s population
https://backlinko.com/reddit-users
Here’s where I found this
From Philippines, was there on reddit for about a decade. There’s that many from that country because most of the users are young and looking for discussion spaces for their hobbies, mainly PC and console gaming but also other niche interests, progressive politics and alternative lifestyles because Facebook is becoming oversaturated with unwanted content.
You have 3 possible reasons: A) those stats aren’t that accurate; B) “unique” is not that unique (same person counted more than once through the month); and C) it might also include bots. Maybe it’s a mix of the 3.
Semrush is supposed to be not that inaccurate. It’s a data analytics platform. I don’t have the subscription to it to verify this myself, but it’s a huge issue if they are posting inaccurate information.