Yeah, notice how this post gives zero statistics on user retention. Probably because the truth in that department breaks the narrative.

Pageviews as some kind of "success statistic" on a forum where every thread is a new page is just dumb. "Total unique visitors" is a meaningless statistic on a website widely accessed on mobile devices. Your cell provider often generates a new IP every time you reconnect to a tower. Landlines can switch IPs too.

An actually useful number would be number of active accounts. How many accounts were active in the last week, or two weeks, or month? My guess is only low tens of thousands. Probably a dense core of just a few thousand posters or less generating the majority of posts and comments (80/20 rule and all that), maybe tens of thousands of accounts who don't post much at all, and the rest of the "unique visitors" are just gawkers, half of which probably aren't even "Trump supporters".

Also, switching gears here, I think it's a little disingenuous to claim that this "sucess" was entirely because of The_Donald moderators. The forum style and layout was invented by the Reddit founders. The only reason The_Donald can use it is because it was originally open-source code. If this website was set up like 4chan or some other forum software, I doubt it would be anywhere near as popular.

Look at how the website regularly shit the bed any time a big news event happened. All that net code can't be easily stolen from Github and costs big bucks to mirror data and serve millions of requests at the same time.

Yeah, notice how this post gives zero statistics on user retention. Probably because the truth in that department breaks the narrative.

Pageviews as some kind of "success statistic" on a forum where every thread is a new page is just dumb. "Total unique visitors" is a meaningless statistic on a website widely accessed on mobile devices. Your cell provider often generates a new IP every time you reconnect to a tower. Landlines can switch IPs too.

An actually useful number would be number of active accounts. How many accounts were active in the last week, or two weeks, or month? My guess is only low tens of thousands. Probably a dense core of just a few thousand posters or less generating the majority of posts and comments (80/20 rule and all that), maybe tens of thousands of accounts who don't post much at all, and the rest of the "unique visitors" are just gawkers, half of which probably aren't even "Trump supporters".