A Graph of New Dreamwidth Users by Year

[florianschild]

I was curious about how many people actually use Dreamwidth, and I found a lovely stats page that shows how many users have joined on every day the site has existed. I love the transparency!

So I downloaded the data into Excel and made this graph:



Thoughts on the decline of new users joining? Has anyone noticed a dropoff in traffic? Are people concerned or is having a larger user base not much of a priority for those of us who like our quiet internet corners? I personally would love to see Dreamwidth have more users and be more active.

The platform has limitations of course; many users these days don't want to use HTML or have to self-host their images. And while I understand the reasoning for not having an app, it's probably a limit to drawing in new users as well. I wonder what, if anything, it would take for this site to actually grow it's user base instead of maintaining/losing users year over year. I'm also not sure if the owners actually want growth either. There's something to be said, of course, for a business model built on sustainability rather than growth. I guess I'm just putting this out there to hear if anyone else has thoughts or concerns about the number of people on the platform.

I crossposted this from my own journal. I hope that's ok.

Comments

[silveradept]

I think usage statistics would be more interesting than new users as well, because denise has repeatedly said in news posts and other places that Dreamwidth isn't chasing growth. To get more users on the platform and "scale up" toward the users of places like Tumblr, Dreamwidth would have to do things more like those platforms.

First would be widespread unlimited media hosting. That would spike storage and media costs immediately, to the point where staying online would require regular infusions of venture capital, angel investors, or advertising revenue. At which point Dreamwidth loses control of itself.

A second complaint about Dreamwidth is that it's difficult to find other users on the platform. No suggestion algorithms, no easy repost options, no starter packs, nothing like that. No content being pushed to your reading page but the stuff you specifically want. "Growth," especially VC or ad-funded growth, demands engagement, and the algorithms that prioritize engagement are often specifically about pouring people you are diametrically opposed to into your feeds, no matter how many blocks and filters you put up to keep them out. And eventually, the advertisers start demanding that certain content should be disallowed on the perform, lest their ads be put next to content that people will complain to the advertiser about. Which usually causes purges and people moving platforms. Dreamwidth doesn't want that. denise mentions that the user base of Dreamwidth has a percentage of paid users that blows every other service out of the water, into fantasy territory for many of them. Trading the user base for an advertiser base is a foolish proposition and ends up with nobody loving you.

Finally, while it's entirely possible for Dreamwidth to be used as a microblogging or shitposting platform, it's garnered a reputation as a long-form blog space, with profundity required, and it doesn't give much in the way of hand-holding about how to post or anything else. So there's effort required there, as well as for finding people to read and comment on. You have to work to use Dreamwidth, and any attempt at growing the platform at any scale would have to reduce the friction of interaction and of posting. There's a delicate balance between being attractive enough for people to put on the effort and having enough friction in place so as to prevent the place from being overrun by robots and spam.

As it is currently set up, Dreamwidth discourages the kind of things that other platforms chasing scale routinely adopt. The people who are here like it in sufficient numbers to keep the lights on and the posts flowing through their support. And Dreamwidth works reasonably well as that backstop of "the place that's still there and that's unlikely to purge your content," so every time some other platform chooses the ads over the users (as they have to), Dreamwidth gets a few more people and a few more people putting in the investment of making the platform work for them and finding other people to interact with.

It doesn't mean it's a perfect platform, but the way that it's being run seems to be sustainable and effective without having to chase things that would be anathema to the user base or a death knell to the platform. In that sense, Dreamwidth has already been a runaway success and continues to be.