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?

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[–] 4 points 9 months ago (1 child)

I'll admit that I'm not that updated on recent changes but reddit used to be open about the vote counts being intentionally inaccurate. I believe this at a point started to include scaling the vote count so that the average popular post would have 10-20k or so up votes, even if the actual vote count would be much higher.

So this would make it almost impossible to make any meaningful conclusions from vote count / active users alone.

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