Polandball is undeniably a massive community. It has proven itself as being one of the internet's foremost memes, along with wojacks and advice animals. However, we have to admit that the community is getting older... but is it dying?

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In January of 2012, the subreddit had 34 active members. In January of 2023 we have over 640,000. The last couple of years have seen a decline in growth, that's certainly true. In 2022 only about 34,000 new members subscribed, the same as 2021 and half of 2020.

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We say COVID is to blame for most ills of the last two years, but shouldn't online activity be... the opposite? I wanted to look deeper into that subscriber number, because what isn't immediately noticeable is the number of *inactive* users.

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Some of the moderation team shouldn't even be counted among the "active" userbase. How many of the users can we say the same? It's hard to know. We know that people who *make* comics are fewer and fewer. Why not just look at the top comics in the last 30 days: Aaron, Oscar, Oscar, Aaron, Aaron, Marzipan, Kaiser, Aaron, Oscar, Aaron, Othermike, Oscar, Aaron, Aaron... I think you get the point.

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Diversity, activity, and involvement is lower than any time since 2014. Not great.

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But that number. **640,000**. Doesn't it just seem... inflated? Reddit reports approximately 52 million daily users. **That** seems inflated. Reddit keeps its inactive account number fairly close to its chest, but we can take a guess. Say each user has a 5% chance of becoming inactive every year. That means 157,000 subscribers aren't really there.

What about a 10% drop-off? 275,000! In order to reach 50% "ghost" users, only a 12.8% annual drop-off rate is necessary. That's a fairly modest amount, and equates to 44,000 users in the last year alone. That's 10 thousand more that the subscribers we gained... For those values, we can only guess. It's a shot in the dark. We can though, estimate how many of our subscribers are dead. This author has taken Reddit's self-reported user demographics combined with US Social Security Administration mortality tables. Yes, I've assumed all users are American, but that should about average it out. The answer to the question is 10,000. Almost exactly by my estimates. 10,000 Of Polandball's subscibers are dead. 2,200 Died in the last year alone. For every user that died we only added 15 new users. So, is Polandball dying? Yes. it is. But it isn't dead yet.

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