Reddit elbows way up social media leaderboard as X trails behind

The US-born social media platform Reddit has reportedly overtaken X and is fast becoming the fifth most popular social media sites in the UK.

The forum-based social media platform Reddit has taken X’s place as the fifth most popular social media platform in the UK.

Reddit has been described as a website comprised of many smaller websites called subreddits that are dedicated to specific topics. The social media platform has loyal users called Redditors who have formed a popular online community.

The Guardian reports that Reddit was visited almost 23 million times in May 2024, whereas X was only visited roughly 22 million times, according to data from communications regulator Ofcom.

This data demonstrates that Reddit is becoming increasingly popular among UK adults. Reddit has grown by 47% since 2023 and has knocked LinkedIn and X off the top UK social media platforms table.

At the top of this table is YouTube after it replaced Facebook as the number-one social media platform in the UK, The Guardian writes.

Since Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter (rebranded to X) in April 2022, web traffic has decreased.

According to Forbes, X (formerly Twitter) experienced a 30% decrease in usage between 2023 and 2024.

Competitors such as Bluesky, a microblogging alternative to X, have been gaining momentum and users after Donald Trump’s election win in November, with many associating Musk’s platform with the President-elect’s divisive campaign.