Those Daily Uniques metrics include crawlers and other activity.

If you look at per-day activity, you'll see spikes at like 2am Central Time, .. the device type when that happens will almost always show an unusually high "Laptop" number (e.g., 80%).

That type of activity is only been occurring over the past couple of months.

So those DAU analytics really don't tell an accurate picture of growth.

I guess it's just less engagement then, at least in my case 😆

How's that going? 🙂

Ya, ending the "first-few comments and posts for free" thing (due to bots) is likely a contributing factor. There was a way described how to bring that back (by letting accounts have a filter and new accounts without upvotes wouldn't rank enough to appear in your view of front page and /recent (unless you had lowered your "min score allowed" threshold).

😅