Rising subreddit - r/dopaminedetoxing

Exponential growth in a previously very niche Silicon Valley trend

In the early hours of Tuesday, just after Midnight, I messaged a buddy about a suddenly surging subreddit. It had seen a huge rise in its number of members, going from 215 members on April 26th to 7.7k members at that time (5th of May).

I also mentioned it in a LinkedIn post on the same day.

Over the past week so far, r/dopaminedetoxing has grown its members by 806%. It was only created on April 21st.

The subreddit, at my time of writing, now stands at 12.6k members and has continued its growth trajectory from a few days ago.

Users in the community post time-lapse videos of themselves in isolated rooms without stimulants (e.g. phones, computers, drug, gaming etc.) and many also post testimonials on how they have adjusted their life positively in terms of not succumbing to distractions all the time after a detox.

Dopamine detoxing or ‘fasting’ has been alluded to before but did not have organic traction at that time. The BBC, Science Alert and other press commented on its appearance in Silicon Valley circles in very late 2019 and early 2020. Search spiked with this press but dropped back down, but importantly, remained elevated. This is always a positive sign because it means there is a power-user group there. Most trends which eventually move mainstream start with a small base of fanatical or dedicated users.

Looking at keywords, whilst ‘fasting’ was the primary term in the US and UK in late 2019 with search spikes from this initial press, ‘detox’ seems to have taken over (the search interest chart below is global data).

In terms of convergence, a metric I often refer to which alerts when a new trend hits 2.5-10% of the interest of an established trend and stays there, dopamine detox has hit about 2.5% of the search interest in detoxing more generally and stayed there for the past week.

There are different levels of dopamine detoxing, with some community members even going so far as to avoid talking to people, reading books or listening to music during their ‘detoxes’ or fasts.

As mentioned in the LinkedIn post above, the trend is a good potential niche to get involved in because there are multiple avenues to approach it from in terms of products and services (supplements, courses, coaching, apparel) and the community has religious undertones to it, which makes people obsessive, likely to be high lifetime value customers for a brand who targets the audience persona.

We can measure this somewhat quantitatively.

The subreddit is ranked around #12,500 at the moment (in terms of member size), but in terms of comments per day, it is ranked at around #1,500. So it is over-indexing on engagement tremendously (comments not just votes).

One person who has taken advantage of the trend already and has gone down the course route with this, is a YouTuber called Andrew Kirby who started posting dopamine detoxing videos about a week or so ago. He started sharing them in the subreddit too. And has grown his subscribers massively in this time period due to his willingness to lean into this burgeoning trend. You can see him adjust his titles to his videos in accordance with this.

Andrew went from 166k subscribers on April 20th to 252k now.

Yesterday, Wednesday the 6th, he gained 17k subscribers.

We are keeping tabs on this trend and monitoring the subreddit growth and will let you know in a separate update if the growth rate starts dropping or plateauing.

One important question is naturally, how much has COVID-19 driven this surge in interest around the practice? It is why we will keep updating on this once lockdowns begin easing in the US and UK, to see if this was boredom/procrastination driven from the event or if there is more organic traction there.