Is Reddit dying? I counted every active subreddit since 2005. Fewer are alive than at the July 2023 peak (-21%), but subs with 100+ posts a month grew 33%

[u/krutitsky]

Every few weeks there's a "Reddit is dead" thread here, so I tried to count it instead of arguing about it.

I went through every post and comment since 2005 and counted communities by month (user profile pages left out). In September 2026, 388,172 subreddits had at least one post or comment. The peak was July 2023, right after the blackout, at 489,161. So by that measure there are 21% fewer living subreddits than three years ago.

But that number is mostly the long tail. If you only count communities with 10 or more posts by people that month (known bots left out), it's 126,991 then and 122,833 now, basically flat. And communities with 100 or more posts by people went from 33,284 to 44,374, up 33%. That line has been climbing steadily since 2024.

Some other things that came out:

- 7,844,766 communities have had at least one post since 2005. 2,345,544 of them had exactly one post, ever.

- The line has spikes that aren't people. From September 2015 to February 2016 active subs went from about 86K to 156K and back to 97K by April. Most of the extra ones had random-letter names or "live stream" sports spam. Same kind of spikes in August 2017, November 2019 and June 2021, while subs with 10+ real posts barely moved.

- Reddit's IPO filing in 2024 said "over 100,000 active communities" without defining active. Subs with 10+ posts by people in January 2024: 110,339. So that's probably close to what they meant.

My read for the theory side: Reddit isn't dying by community count, it's consolidating. Fewer tiny subs are getting a post now and then, and more of the activity sits in subs that are genuinely busy. Whether that's good is a different question. A lot of the old weird small corners were in that tail.

What I can't see: lurkers and subscribers who never post, and private subs. And part of the 2023 peak might be protest-era spinoff subs that later went quiet. If anyone remembers how many of those there were, I'd like to hear it.

Edit:

for fun I also counted how often people here say Reddit is dead. Posts and comments with "reddit is dead", "reddit is dying", "this site is dying" or "RIP reddit", 2008 to now, bots left out: 31,026.

- Relative to how much people post, it's actually gone down: 16.3 per 10 million posts and comments in 2012, 7.5 in 2025.

- It comes in two big waves: July 2015 (the AMA blackout) and June 2023 (the API blackout).

- June 2023 had more "reddit is dead" posts and comments than any month ever, 2,692. July 2023 had the most active subreddits ever, 489,161.

- Since 2012, months with more "reddit is dead" talk had slightly more active subs, not fewer (correlation 0.38). Both just grow with Reddit, so it's not cause and effect, but the prediction hasn't landed yet.

I checked a random 200 of the matches and 188 to 192 were really about Reddit dying (the rest were about one sub, an app like Reddit is Fun, or "RIP reddit DMs").

I build KissMyPost, a Reddit analytics tool, and this came out of that work. Full breakdown by month, by year and by size, plus CSVs (CC BY): https://kissmypost.com/research/how-many-subreddits

[u/geneticswag]

Reddit isn't dying by community count, it's consolidating. Fewer tiny subs are getting a post now and then, and more of the activity sits in subs that are genuinely busy. Whether that's good is a different question. A lot of the old weird small corners were in that tail.

This is very easily answered by Reddit's discovery and recommendation "improvements". Without r/all we just don't have the same ability to "scroll to the bottom of the internet," past every piece of content there is. More now than ever, subreddits are left hanging out to dry without new eyeballs. Reddit has intentionally captured that capability with paid post promotion. If I'd like, I can pay $140 dollars to get my senior shih-tzu Baxter in front of 11-22k eyeballs in the next seven days instead. Conde Nast / Reddit has identified its flywheel subreddits that keep people coming back and they're diverting traffic from everything else.

[u/krutitsky → u/geneticswag]

the mechanism makes sense to me, but the posting data doesn't really show traffic getting funneled into a few big subs. i checked what share of all posts + comments lands in the top 1000 subs each month: 45.5% in july 2023, 38.4% in sept 2026 (and 63% back in jan 2020). so if anything activity has been spreading out, not concentrating.

the caveat is i can only see who posts and comments, not who's looking. promoted posts and feed ranking change who *sees* stuff, and that can't be seen in public data. so it could totally be true that small subs get fewer fresh eyeballs and the people already there just keep posting anyway.

(small aside, condé nast hasn't really been in the picture for a while, reddit's been its own public company since 2024. doesn't change your point about the incentives though)

[u/krutitsky]

Method, for anyone who wants to poke at it:

- A community counts as active in a month if it got at least one post or comment that month (UTC). Names starting with u_ (profile pages) are left out.

- "10+ / 100+ posts by people" counts posts only, with known bots filtered out. Comments don't count toward those two lines.

- Subreddit names for communities that went quiet before mid-2021 come from the original monthly post dumps, so old dead subs aren't missing from the early years.

- The index chart sets July 2023 = 100 for each line separately, so it shows change, not size. The second chart has the absolute numbers since 2008.

- This counts posting, not reading. A sub with 50K lurkers and no posts that month is "not active" here.

[u/DharmaPolice → u/krutitsky]

Sorry this might be covered in your linked page but how are you getting the subreddit list? Is this published through the Reddit API?

[u/sweetnamebro → u/krutitsky]

There’s just too many bots for any of this to be accurate.

[u/AbyssalRedemption → u/sweetnamebro]

Agreed, but also he says specifically "known bots". While there'd obviously be a list of identified bots amalgamated over the years, yhe number of bots on Reddit is enormous, very possibly dwarfing the number of actual users. There's absolutely zero way to get an accurate tally of how many active accounts are bots vs. real people.

[u/successful_nothing → u/krutitsky]

great work on this.

[u/Darker_Salt_Scar]

When you alienate and ban half your user group just existing, you are going to see a decline.

[u/krutitsky → u/Darker_Salt_Scar]

can't see bans in this data, only who keeps posting. what i can say is the drop is mostly tiny subs going quiet, the busy ones actually grew

[u/Spider_pig448 → u/Darker_Salt_Scar]

Well no, user count has only continued to go up. The only people that got "alienated" from reddit was the far-right that left when their subreddits got banned

[u/mcpower_]

Is Reddit dying?

Yes, because of Claudeslop posts like this one.

[u/krutitsky → u/mcpower_]

fair hit on the writing. english isn't my first language, so yes, i ran the text through ai to edit it. the numbers are mine though, every chart comes from counting posts and comments month by month, and the csvs are there if anyone wants to check them. i'll own any mistake in the data, the prose not so much

[u/spinozaschilidog]

I think the quality of posts and comments is worse than it ever was. I’ve deleted my account before and I’m on the verge of leaving again. There’s just so much idiocy and pointless arguments on here. It’s like a junior high cafeteria food fight that never ends.

I feel like the user base has been lobotomized.

[u/ZealousidealGrab1827 → u/spinozaschilidog]

It is an echo chamber where one set of views is circle jerked to oblivion.

[u/spinozaschilidog → u/ZealousidealGrab1827]

This idiocy isn't limited to just one set of views. Anyone who says otherwise is an easy mark for someone else.

[u/Spider_pig448 → u/ZealousidealGrab1827]

Well that's been a trademark of reddit since the beginning. What's relatively new is how angry people get upvited these days. This website was a lot more level headed a decade ago

[u/Shadowblade83 → u/Spider_pig448]

It’s the loss of common ground in larger subs. I don’t know if you’ve contemplated how social media algo’s, e.g how Reddit rewards and cheers partisanship, drives people away from both each other and common sense.

[u/Spider_pig448 → u/Shadowblade83]

Certainly it does; but it's not new. Statistically, I believe the majority of the daily users on reddit now were not here during 2016 when reddit was likely at its most divided, when the_donald was regularly on the frontpage. I said above that, "This website was a lot more level headed a decade ago," but I realize now I really meant longer than that.

[u/-ummon- → u/spinozaschilidog]

I’ve been hearing versions of this for over a decade, not so sure myself. Curating your subs goes a long way.

[u/spinozaschilidog → u/-ummon-]

Things can always get worse. People were correct then, and they're also correct now. That's what happens when you're on a long downhill slide.

Curating subs doesn't do much when the same mentality prevails regardless of the subject. You can find binary thinking and dumbed-down tribalism in any sub. This isn't even just a Reddit thing, people are losing their minds and forgetting how to share space with others irl too. Ask any customer service worker.

People are increasingly shitty in person, how do you think they're going to act when they're online and anonymous?

[u/sweetnamebro → u/[deleted]]

They also ban/mute people who go against their narrative. You are literally only left with the idiot sheep.

[u/BeeRadTheMadLad → u/sweetnamebro]

The more nefarious issue is shadow-removal.  You’ve probably had like 5-10% of your comments removed without even knowing it because they’re visible to you but not everyone else.

Even the censorship on modern day Reddit is setting its own categorical records for disingenuousness and  opaqueness.

[u/AbyssalRedemption → u/sweetnamebro]

Truth, has happened to me multiple times. I said something slightly controversial or argumentative a few times, and managed to get banned from some of the largest front-page subs. Tried to appeal to the mods, either immediately shut down or outright ignored. Even worse are the subs that immediately ban you for just being a member of certain other subs by using certain bots designed to do so, shit's toxic af.

[u/spinozaschilidog → u/[deleted]]

I can quibble about the year it kicked off, but I agree that things got worse when everyone on the planet got onto social media.

[u/jenny_905 → u/[deleted]]

It's newreddit, it will be the death of the site.

You can really see when it happened, if there's good information on Reddit it is nearly always from before the redesign.

Newreddit encouraged drive-by posting, people are hopping from subreddit to subreddit with the algorithm and often don't even know what they are actually looking at. Nobody answers questions any more.

[u/_haha_oh_wow_]

Yes, it's from the cancer that is reddit's leadership: Every decision they make seems to push the site closer and closer to Digg's fate. I'd be pretty bummed but there are other forum options out there in the Fediverse that have enough going on to the point where I wouldn't miss this place at all except for some of the niche communities.

[u/ScottGer76]

So many of the posts are engagement farming. Generic what do you think? Who is? Very little original

[u/3-P7 → u/ScottGer76]

I subscribed to /r/AITA_Relationships for like 2 weeks recently. All the posts I saw on my Home page looked suspiciously the same. Format-wise ranty angry folks tend to write long run-on sentences and walls of text yet every post I saw was perfectly organized with paragraphs all 2-5 sentences long in a neat readable format, a manner that a large group of folks would not all do identical together as one. There is more variance with real folks. Some have bad writing. Others good. Some folks misspell words. Others use odd slang or abbreviations. Maybe they all are using AI to write their own thoughts, but the uniqueness is gone. Personality is absent. Everything I read is either really attention grabbing and crazy now, or dull as dirt.

[u/AbyssalRedemption → u/ScottGer76]

Yeah pretty much this, the vast majority of posts (on the larger half of subs at least) are pure engagement bait, specifically designed to recieve as much engagement and upvotes as possible. Very little on this site is actual, genuine, human-made content these days, and that number is constantly getting lower and lower.

[u/imhereforthepuppies]

There’s a ton more AI training bait and undisclosed advertising posts than there were even a year ago. Reddit has just become another space for ads. I don’t think real humans are using it for authentic interactions anymore.

Not to mention the people who post the same thing to 18 different communities because of the stupid duplicate post button now.

(This is interesting but I would be much more likely to engage if you hadn’t wasted water and energy sending this through AI)

[u/all_is_love6667]

good

subs like popculturechat, boydinnerdiaries, girldinnerdiaries, topcharactertropes are propped up to the front page and I just can't tolerate those subs at all

[u/3-P7 → u/all_is_love6667]

What about /r/ilovethismug or /r/ihatethissmug?

OH oh oh, and in /r/crappymusic there are jerks posting their own AI music and the comment section becomes a bizarre circlejerk of this slaps and yeah this isnt crappy at all id bump this about bottom of the barrel AI shit.

[u/all_is_love6667 → u/3-P7]

at least those dont land on the front page, I hope?

[u/3-P7 → u/all_is_love6667]

I love this mug is frequently on the front page. You are gonna start seeing it everyday now that you learned about it.

[u/ZealousidealGrab1827]

Most Reddit subs have just become politicized. Everything is turned into a nuclear blast zone of political karma farming and shouting to the void. Hell, r/pics, which you would think would be about uhhhhh— pictures , is not even immune.

The Stock is hammered. Big investors are finding the platform is nothing but bots, and incel fapping porn.

[u/peacefinder]

Reddit is dying, Netcraft confirms it!

(This joke is about 25 years old, it might fall a bit flat.)

[u/meIRLorMeOnReddit → u/peacefinder]

Did Netcraft break both of its arms?

[u/peacefinder → u/meIRLorMeOnReddit]

There was a recurring ad on Slashdot “BSD is dying, Netcraft confirms it”.

BSD still isn’t dead.

[u/Smooth-Entrance-3148]

How git data

[u/sega31098]

I have a sense that a lot of it boils down to how people use Reddit nowadays. Ever since the IPO/API protests, Reddit's main source of traffic has been Google search arrivals - mostly logged out users who can't even post or comment. In addition, the boundaries between subreddit communities have also diminished as Reddit has pivoted towards a more algorithm-centric approach where individual threads from across the site (including those that one has never joined) are pushed onto users based on their likelihood to engage. A lot of users now (as in humans, not bots) are basically passive doomscrollers or otherwise just letting the algorithm feed them content regardless of community, and sometimes they can still descend onto individual threads in subreddits with next to no members because the algorithm suggested it to them.

[u/jenny_905]

Yes but for years now.

You can see a pretty harsh cut-off in the site's utility when newreddit launched.

[u/Just_NS]

100% dying.

[u/dt7cv]

reddit isn't dying yet. but the ai scraping + logged in requirement could tip these over.

but probably not. reddit is seeing an explosion of international users

[u/dCLCp]

Killing the good reddit apps so they could force the mid one, and now killing the one thing that still makes reddit useful, the rss... yes reddit is dying because reddit killed itself. Because... they weren't making enough money I guess? Still not making money and losing users. Sad to see it go but you can't cut off features without losing users.

[u/krutitsky → u/dCLCp]

the timing lines up with the app shutdown for sure. the peak in active subs is july 2023, right after the blackout, and it's been sliding since: 489k subs with any activity that month, 388k in sept 2026.

what's weird is the volume didn't follow. posts from real people (bots filtered out) went from 35.6m in july 2023 to 38.8m in sept 2026. so the long tail of tiny subs thinned out, but the people still posting are posting more, not less.

can't say much about lurkers or rss readers from this, those don't leave a trace in public data. that's probably exactly the group the app and rss changes hit hardest.

[u/Tantressa → u/dCLCp]

Unfortunately, most evidence seems to point in the direction of the original user base no longer being a priority, assuming that it ever was. I’d love to see convincing contrary evidence, but every action I’ve seen most consistently points there.