This is a very non-specific statement. As a former moderator, Reddit gave us lots of metrics to measure “traffic”. Site visits, unique visits, engagement… all of these can be used to talk about “traffic”. It’s also not hard to spin up a couple bots, talk about site visits, not unique visits and call everything “normal”.
Metrics, especially vanity metrics are very easy to twist if you have a narrative to tell. And boy, does Reddit, Inc. have a narrative to tell.
The first thing they taught us in my graduate level statistics class was:
Anyone can make a statistic that backs up their bias. You’re here to learn how to accurately represent a situation with statistics, and be able to point out when others are misusing statistics
This is a very non-specific statement. As a former moderator, Reddit gave us lots of metrics to measure “traffic”. Site visits, unique visits, engagement… all of these can be used to talk about “traffic”. It’s also not hard to spin up a couple bots, talk about site visits, not unique visits and call everything “normal”.
Metrics, especially vanity metrics are very easy to twist if you have a narrative to tell. And boy, does Reddit, Inc. have a narrative to tell.
Yep.
The first thing they taught us in my graduate level statistics class was:
That’s the hard part