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Reddit beats out Facebook to become the third-most-popular site on the web

Chuong Nguyen
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Christian de Looper/Digital Trends

Reddit has now surpassed Facebook and is now the third-most-popular internet destination for users in the United States, according to rankings published by Amazon subsidiary Alexa (no, not that Alexa), a website that tracks and analyzes web traffic. Despite its recent controversial site redesign, this means that Reddit now trails Google and YouTube, but ranks ahead of Facebook and Amazon.

While Reddit still doesn’t attract the same amount of traffic as Google or YouTube, the good news for the site is that users spend more time browsing the site, averaging 15 minutes and 10 seconds every day, The Next Web reported. For comparison, users spend just 7 minutes and 16 seconds on Google, 8 minutes and 31 seconds on YouTube, 10 minutes and 50 seconds on Facebook, and 7 minutes and 37 seconds on Amazon. Reddit also outranks the top five sites on Alexa’s list with more daily page views per visitors. Rounding out the top 10 sites are Wikipedia, Yahoo, Twitter, eBay, and Netflix.

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Reddit’s rise comes at a tumultuous time for Facebook, which has experienced a number of high-profile scandals over user privacy and data sharing in recent months. Most notably, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, impacting as many as 87 million Facebook users, has resulted in users calling for a boycott of Facebook over the company’s data collection and advertising practices. In response to the scandal, Facebook unveiled changes to make its site safer, and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, also known as GDPR, subsequently went into effect to help make the internet a safer place for users.

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Reddit itself has also been a subject of controversy. Created by founder Alexis Ohanian, the site merged with Aaron Swartz’s Infogami in 2006. In 2011, Swartz was charged with federal hacking laws for downloading millions of academic articles from a subscription service, to which he was given a guest account through MIT. Two years later, Swartz was found dead in his apartment by suicide. Most recently, Reddit made headlines when it refused to ban hate speech on its site, arguing that free speech should be protected unless there is a threat of violence or harm. In a separate incident, Reddit was also the home where the personal images of celebrities were uploaded following an Apple iCloud attack.

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Chuong Nguyen
Chuong Nguyen
Computing Writer
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