That would be stretching my personal definition of social media, but yes Reddit does publish figures showing it's pretty much exactly as skewed towards men as Instagram is towards women, very interesting. I wonder about Strava, there seems to be no data available on that, maybe because it isn't ad-supported.
The reason I'm not so sure as neither Reddit nor HN are oriented around the personal profile in the same way as the others are. HN could (probably should) go completely "anonymous coward" and it would be no less useful.
They random dialled, then surveyed 6000 people, ~4500 agreed to be surveyed further (with cash incentive), of those ~300 are Reddit users and the stats are taken from there. You can choose to do the survey by web or regular mail .. respondents who agree to be surveyed by mail actually take the survey at a level of 20%; if I read correctly they assume none of those sent the mail survey are net users.
The point of the survey was analysing political activity.
It seems likely to give only broad indications at best. Unfortunately this result from < 300 USAmericans seems to be repeated as "this is the global demographic of Reddit" in a few places.
I privately kept data for a time. Some of that data was lost at some point. I very carefully published some of my data on a previous blog that I recently took offline.
This is from memory. This handle is less than a year old, but I've been here over 9 years. Back in the day, members sometimes posted surveys casually. I saw several of them over time.
It was posted because it has a link to an actual poll so you can see what one looks like if you want to try to search the site yourself. I've searched. I did so when I answered the question. I've done so on other occasions. I can't find the polls I remember seeing. I don't know what I am doing wrong.
It also has a blurb by me from several years ago:
According to previous polls, most people here are male and in their 20's or 30's.
So that's fresher testimony that corresponds to my current recollection.
That's the best I can do. I wish I could find the data I remember seeing. I can't. I've repeatedly tried, to no avail.
Perhaps I should just keep my mouth shut henceforth rather than commenting that "I've been here 9+ years. There have been polls in the past. This is what I remember."
Because it consistently feels like it gets me nothing but push back rather than being some kind of meaningful, useful contribution to the conversation indicating that someone who has paid an excess of attention to such data over the years to try to sort their own relationship to the site has concluded that, yea, verily, your impression that there sure are a lot of men here seems accurate to me.
That would be stretching my personal definition of social media, but yes Reddit does publish figures showing it's pretty much exactly as skewed towards men as Instagram is towards women, very interesting. I wonder about Strava, there seems to be no data available on that, maybe because it isn't ad-supported.
The reason I'm not so sure as neither Reddit nor HN are oriented around the personal profile in the same way as the others are. HN could (probably should) go completely "anonymous coward" and it would be no less useful.