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The end result was a stalemate. Reddit did not change any of its policies. Enough of the people responsible for posting and managing content left the platform t

The end result was a stalemate. Reddit did not change any of its policies. Enough of the people responsible for posting and managing content left the platform to cause a noticeable impact on it. Here's a fun thing to look at, https://subredditstats.com/ https://subredditstats.com/ for any major subreddit, e.g.: https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews https://subredditstats.com/r/explainlikeimfive https://subredditstats.com/r/explainlikeimfive https://subredditstats.com/r/videos https://subredditstats.com/r/videos All of the most popular subreddits show a steady decline from 2019 to present, with a sharp drop in July 2023. Once this happens to a platform, it's rare for the platform to ever get those users back at scale. It's safe money that Reddit will now be a zombie platform, a la Slashdot -- still up and running with some users, but with flat or declining activity forever.

wmidwestranger 3y ago
I'm not sure any platform can nosedive quite like slashdot. I'm not sure what the wreck looked like but the entire culture of slashdot and fresh meat seemed to disappear at some point.
- spacecadet 3y ago
  No, we just never really cared to rise above the noise...
- crawancon 3y ago
  surely Digg had a nosedive of unmatched proportions.
  - Mistletoe 3y ago
    How can we Digg Reddit? You are correct the nosedive of Digg was stunning in force and speed. I remember it so clearly.
  - wmidwestranger 3y ago
    I do remember digg crashing because they were... Using the algorithm to get paid by advertisers and censoring posts, who could imagine? The downfall of Digg led directly to reddit and the death of Mr. Schwartz began reddits long path into slow enshitification.
pdntspa 3y ago
Anecdotally, it certainly feels worse with an inflection point around July. There are a lot more pop culture posts full of meme comments appearing in global top
to11mtm 3y ago
The SNR has dropped poorly on a lot of subreddits that are still active. One of my former favorites (the one I made an account for!) went from a very good and healthy moderation to a weird form of 'If we have to go into the thread more than once we have a short fuse for harsh enforcement of rules, nonpopular threads can still be cool though'. It will be very interesting to see what happens next year; historically election cycles tend to make SNR worse and people just break.
caslon 3y ago
> Heads up! This data is likely out of date or inaccurate now that Reddit has decided to kill the open ecosystem that existed around Reddit. I don't earn any money from this site, and if my calculations are correct it'd cost me a couple thousand dollars per month with their new API pricing, so yeah. If you can, it's probably worth leaving Reddit for other platforms - especially open-source/federated ones like Lemmy. It shows different stats because the API changed. DAU is likely higher than ever.
- buildbot 3y ago
  It doesn’t matter, because importantly, now they can game it however they need for their IPO. I stopped posting and know many others who did. The platform lost a lot and the front page is noticeably more trashy/Facebook like than it used to be.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > trashy/Facebook Don't mistake "bad for people like us" with "bad for business" — Duolingo appears to be doing fantastically well as a corporation despite having deliberately made themselves into something I found painful to use and therefore stopped using. Facebook is rolling in money despite being your example of bad. Tabloid newspapers sell very well.
    - buildbot 3y ago
      Oh I don't - I'm sure they will (probably) make plenty of money. Then again, TikTok seems more popular by the day across most groups of people I interact with - technical and non-technical millennials and boomers all use it very extensively in my group of friends and acquaintances.
  - smrtinsert 3y ago
    Reddit died with the mobile clients.
- thaumaturgy 3y ago
  That message on subredditstats is more recent than the sharp drop; the drop appeared during and immediately after the protest, and the users didn't come back. The policy change took effect shortly after, and subredditstats only recently added that message to their pages (it wasn't there ~week ago). It also passes the sniff test. Pick any of the largest subreddits from the list and look at its front page. r/funny, with 54m "readers", has multiple posts on its front page right now with less than a dozen comments. r/news has more activity on its posts, but still far, far less than 2019. It's not like there's a thriving community on Reddit that makes subredditstats' numbers look wildly wrong.
4death4 3y ago
That’s really interesting data. But isn’t it possible less popular subreddits have picked up the slack?
- _kulang 3y ago
  Just have a a look through /r/all and compare to what it was before. Good moderation essentially led to well curated content. At the moment more subreddits contribute in my opinion worse content
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    /r/all has turned into a cesspit that makes 4chan look like the Library of Alexandria in comparison.
    - llbeansandrice 3y ago
      Yeah anyone trying to determine the outcome just by active users is missing the reality of what the platform has become.
  - rzl1235 3y ago
    [dead]
dubeye 3y ago
The attempt to change policy completely failed. Wasn't a stalemate in any sense of the word
- ben_w 3y ago
  Pyrrhic victory for Reddit Corporation?
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    Hardly Phyrrhic. "Noticeable in numbers" does not equate to even short-term financial damage, let alone harm to the longer-term financial outlook. Reddit Corporation won unambiguously, as expected by most reasonable observers.
    - Rastonbury 3y ago
      If those numbers are to be believed, it ruined any chance of their IPO for a couple of years. It's hard to sweep 'we lost 20%+ MAUs because of a policy change' under the rug when users/impressions are the lifeblood of a social media site
      - redserk 3y ago
        I’d wager the interest rate hikes and increasing conservative decision making around acquisitions has a greater impact on pushing back the IPO. Reddit killed off almost every third party app and had half of the site shut down for a few days, but still came out ahead with a site that’s still very active and with the bonus of pruning unpaid mods who would’ve been likely to disrupt the site again. Reddit’s only realistic time to IPO was mid-pandemic.
- Arson9416 3y ago
  We did it reddit![1] 1. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-did-it-reddit https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-did-it-reddit
- Uptrenda 3y ago
Pathogen-David 3y ago
I took the protest as an opportunity to quit my 12 year Reddit addiction cold turkey and never came back, seems like I'm not the only one. Sometimes I miss /r/houseplants but I'm better off overall.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  What did you switch to?
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    I never found an equivalent alternative. I still log on to my local city subreddit occasionally (~1x/month) to see if there's any local news I missed. But otherwise I've just moved on to doing other things with my time.
  - lupusreal 3y ago
    When I left reddit I didn't "switch to" anything. When I left I found it didn't leave a void that needed filling. When I was using I thought I needed reddit or something like reddit, but I was wrong. 7 years clean, I'm never going back.
  - circuit10 3y ago
    I'm not the person you asked but I ended up replacing it with this site...
    - LesZedCB 3y ago
      me too...
  - Pathogen-David 3y ago
    Reddit was a bad habit for me, so I've resisted outright replacing it. (I basically haven't even looked at Lemmy.) I mainly read Hacker News more than I used to and started reading Ask a Manager[0] regularly. A big benefit of both is that they aren't "bottomless" like Reddit so I won't waste too much time on them. AAM fulfills my desire to learn about others' lived experiences, but the relatively narrow topic range means it becomes uninteresting if I read the archives for too long. [0]: https://www.askamanager.org/ https://www.askamanager.org/
n2d4 3y ago
This is just straight misinformation. If you go on any of the "big subs" you linked, you'll see that there are far more comments than that per day. For example, in ELI5, by just taking the 5 most commented posts that were posted in the last 24h, they have 700 comments which is more than the peak that Subreddit Stats says they had since July. Instead, if you go on Subreddit Stats and read the text with the big red font, you'll see the explanation why the API changes have made such a difference: > Heads up! This data is likely out of date or inaccurate now that Reddit has decided to kill the open ecosystem that existed around Reddit. I don't earn any money from this site, and if my calculations are correct it'd cost me a couple thousand dollars per month with their new API pricing, so yeah. If you can, it's probably worth leaving Reddit for other platforms - especially open-source/federated ones like Lemmy. My assumption is the maintainer just hasn't edited their scraper at all, and it's now running into lots of rate limiting and missing most new comments and posts. The fact that subscriber growth has remained constant supports that thesis.
- josefx 3y ago
  > they have 700 comments which is more than the peak that Subreddit Stats says they had since July. So only down by two thirds, so they still have to double down if they want to outcompete X.
  - n2d4 3y ago
    I compared a lower bound of actual comments to the upper bound of the number claimed by SRS. In reality, the number is much higher (by taking all posts instead of just 5, and including comments made today on posts that were posted yesterday).
- namrog84 3y ago
  I wonder how many of newer comments are coming from the proliferation of decent and accessible chat bots. Itd be easier than ever to pipe in stuff and get decent thing to comment. For bot farms and just personal curiosities.
Racing0461 3y ago
Is the data correct tho? Since its mos tlikely using the same api that was cencelled causing th eblackouts.
- thaumaturgy 3y ago
  I don't think it was ever precisely accurate in absolute terms, and it surely isn't more accurate now, but it appears to be accurate in relative terms -- i.e., as percentage changes in activity over time. A semi-random sampling of subreddits corroborates the conclusions of the data (that there are far fewer user contributions now).
  - Racing0461 3y ago
    makes sense. if it was consistently inaccurate, the drop in traffic relative to the moving average would be captured.
praisewhitey 3y ago
add this to the list https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/ https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/
soulofmischief 3y ago
At the top of the page: > Heads up! This data is likely out of date or inaccurate now that Reddit has decided to kill the open ecosystem that existed around Reddit. I don't earn any money from this site, and if my calculations are correct it'd cost me a couple thousand dollars per month with their new API pricing
dicriseg 3y ago
I don’t go there more than once a week anymore because there isn’t a good mobile app. I previously doomscrolled Reddit for a couple of hours each day. It’s been great for me!
screye 3y ago
The exodus was worse than the numbers indicate. Platforms are heavily Pareto skewed.[1]. The top 5% of reddit users are the primary (posters, mods) and secondary (commenters) content creators who are responsible for 95% of the life on reddit. The protest was led by this top 5%, and I presume they're also the main group that atrophied. The scale of damage is therefore underreported in simple usage statistics. [1] I just coined the term, and I'm proud of it. Now shatter my dreams, and tell how it has already been around for decades.
- wizzwizz4 3y ago
  "Pareto skewness" appears in https://hal.science/hal-00700465 https://hal.science/hal-00700465 (doi:10.1109/asonam.2012.91) from 2012, though I'm not sure whether it has the same sense. Unfortunately, https://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/viewtopic.php?t=3194#post_content44019 https://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/viewtopic.php?t=319... from 2013 is a perfect match: > Etsy seems dominated by stores that sell nothing with a few that do rather well. It's severely Pareto skewed. This is a relatively rare use of language, so you might deserve co-invention credit.
  - screye 3y ago
    I appreciate your effort in thoroughly destroying my dreams, yet politely giving me a consolation price. I'll take it !
- manojlds 3y ago
  Pareto screwed
Uptrenda 3y ago
Reddit mods have some of the worst reputations for power abuse on the entire internet. People in the comments are saying that many of these people quit with the implication that this is bad. But what if it's not? There are quite a few stories of these people being horrible gate keepers that pushed certain pet agendas. It's possible with these people out that new ideas can flourish and more people will be able to participate.
- intended 3y ago
  My constant answer to this is to volunteer oneself. Please. There are many subs, which lack mods and need to throw bodies at mod queues. If it helps, I’ve seen Reddit outreach programs to mods, and they used to respect the opinions of certain mods and subs. Spez recently joined a mod team. It’s enlightening, one of those “everyone should do this” kind of experiences. Reddit modding in particular is not just modding, but also community outreach and management, typically for text.
  - Uptrenda 3y ago
    You can't just sign up as a mod though. The people who are mods are there because they were members of a select clique and when recruiting they're only going to choose similar people. The closest you can get to having an open process is starting your own sub but then: you've always been free to yell where no one can hear you.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    Why should or would any normal person work for free for a billion dollar company like Reddit? That's why they get the kind of mods that they have.
arp242 3y ago
That data seems wrong. I don't use Reddit much, but I checked the data aginast some smaller subs I sometimes check, and according to those charts they have just a few comments per day, but I know for a fact that's wrong. It's wrong for all subs I checked. For example: https://subredditstats.com/r/thethickofit https://subredditstats.com/r/thethickofit Just 3 comments for Nov 22, 8 for Nov 23. But how does that square with the existence of this thread from Nob 22 with 84 comments? https://old.reddit.com/r/thethickofit/comments/181d68u/ben_swain/ https://old.reddit.com/r/thethickofit/comments/181d68u/ben_s... And there's a bunch of other threads too! It's not just "a little bit wrong" it's completely wrong. That site seems about on the ball as a dead seal.
- swores 3y ago
  Maybe 81 of the 84 comments were either third party bot comments, or a Reddit-run LLM designed to make the sub look more active than it really is (the 2023, fewer people hours, version of what they did to launch the site), and subredditstats.com has detected that? I doubt that's the case, but just as there are sites that analyse an Amazon product's reviews to judge real vs. fake, it's not impossible that a Reddit comment counting serving could do the same.
  - yorwba 3y ago
    It seems more likely that subredditstats.com detected that "This data is likely out of date or inaccurate now that Reddit has decided to kill the open ecosystem that existed around Reddit. I don't earn any money from this site, and if my calculations are correct it'd cost me a couple thousand dollars per month with their new API pricing, so yeah." given that that's what it says in the big wall of red text at the top.
  - valianteffort 3y ago
    One of my favorite conspiracies is that reddit is mostly just LLM's and paid agents talking to eachother. Employed by various intel agencies, governments, and reddit themselves trying to astroturf and sway conversation in one direction or another.
akkartik 3y ago
I'm still off Reddit and Twitter, and plan to keep it that way no matter what. Gotta be the change you want to see in the world.
- dv35z 3y ago
  Because of your comment, I made to decision to delete my account. The underlying reason is that I want to shape my life where I only do business with organizations which prioritize (1) quality, (2) integrity, (3) excellent customer experiences. It’s got me thinking about other companies I’m currently doing business with, and how I can make decisions so that my values are put into practice by my actions & behaviors. Thanks!
- crawancon 3y ago
  same here fellow human. fight the power!
- caskstrength 3y ago
  This is the right approach and I did the same. Always surprised how many people here and on other sites whine and moan constantly about how they hate Reddit, Twitter and FB and can't seem to handle even slightest inconvenience to switch ("Oh Mastodon doesn't have a quote-tweet functionality, I can live without it!", "But-but-but my hiking group is on FB!", etc.). You can't argue with big tech companies, the only language they understand is reduced profit.
paulddraper 3y ago
It wasn't a "stalemate," Reddit got its way and the subreddits were reopened.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- paulddraper 3y ago
  And despite some users leaving, is a steady #18 on SimilarWeb. That's not to say that Reddit has a great, glorious future. But by any quantifiable metrics, Reddit "won."
RickJWagner 3y ago
I wish that were true. I like some small hobby-related sub-reddits, I don't care if a lot people participate. The political trolls and haters are overwhelming. I wish they'd all drop off.
ClassyJacket 3y ago
That's not a stalemate, reddit just won.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jimmytucson 3y ago
> sharp drop in July 2023 They shut off API access to their data around the very same time. Is that a coincidence?
- pawptart 3y ago
  No, and in fact, it's almost certainly the cause given the huge disclaimer on the linked page.
adra 3y ago
Poor, poor Slashdot. For me it was murdered during the 2016 US elections when they welcomed infectiously click bait political shit fest that literally spread to like every story. I contributed at that point for like 12+ years? I couldn't stand the vitriol and moderation clearly didn't function, so cest la vis.
- barrysteve 3y ago
  Metafilter too became black and white, politically divided in 2015. Murdered by politics.
rglullis 3y ago
It has been far from a stalemate. Reddit has won this battle, but the war is not over. Saying that as someone been dedicating full-time since September to a project to help people migrate from Reddit to Lemmy [0], the truth is that there is simply no alternative yet for all the niche communities that are established there. About a month ago, I posted here [1] about my project to try to make it easier to sign up and automatically discover/subscribe the Lemmy communities [2], but I wasn't expecting to have such a long tail of communities that need to be mapped out. The ~150 users that signed up to alien.top led to a discovery of about 6000 different subreddits. I was doing the work of curation and creating alternative communities by hand, but I realized that was going to be an endless task. This is why I started working on a crowdsourced solution [3], which I launched last Friday [0]: https://github.com/mushroomlabs/fediverser https://github.com/mushroomlabs/fediverser [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38007028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38007028 [2]: https://portal.alien.top/ https://portal.alien.top/ [3]: https://fediverser.network https://fediverser.network
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
IAmGraydon 3y ago
It’s bad data. They changed the way they collect data when the price of API access went up. The drop you see in July 2023 isn’t real.
lopis 3y ago
> It's safe money that Reddit will now be a zombie platform That's just not the reality. I'm surprised and pleased to see that big subreddits suffered a significant decline, but I notice the number of subscribers continues to grow. Also, after the the dust settled, Lemmy activity really took a downturn. Small communities just can't survive the migration en masse. Whenever I need to look up something I still eventually need to check reddit, and most communities seem alive and healthy... The truth is, major subreddits are not what keeps reddit alive.
crossroadsguy 3y ago
I think in case of Slashdot and Digg et all there were places users went on to. In case of Reddit, while decline might true, there is no such “destination” or a path to migrate to. The users are either coming back or have never gone anywhere in the first place, because that “place” isn’t there. I have seen next to no engagement change in subreddits where the mods didn’t make it very difficult or impossible to engage (i.e either stayed neutral, or made notional changes and few posts). In fact growth as if been seen at normal rates, as if nothing happened.
deafpolygon 3y ago
I didn't perceive any sharp drop-- quite the opposite. The negative press drove more people towards Reddit. The average person didn't care about what the mods wanted.
mlrtime 3y ago
. Enough of the people responsible for posting and managing content left the platform to cause a noticeable impact on it. This is untrue from my pov. I see no change at all, /r/all is useless garbage memes. My custom page is mostly high signal. And the occasional tech search yields good results.
winternett 3y ago
Out of all the social platforms around, I think Reddit has the best model for organizing and segmenting content and user-based content control... I'm not referring to the mobile app of course, but the desktop version allows the user to control what they see for the most part, outside of not being able to block undesirable subreddits. With Ad Block (of course) it is fairly enjoyable, outside of the occasional unexpected (NSFW) snuff clips you see on it for absolutely no good reason. My preferred way of viewing reddit content when I am not using the old reddit desktop version with RES is usually on "redditp.com". Reddit is not great mind you, there's plenty of room for improvement, but it's a welcome break from the ultra-repetitive and deeply psychologically manipulative ad laced feeds that TikTok and Instagram have. Redditp.com is a video and picture scroller that is also customizable by modifying the site URL, so content from specific subreddits can be viewed on it by scrolling rather than by expanding each individual post. They really need a UI that allows subreddit titles to be selectable on it. They also need to reign in moderators that strictly control subreddits to enrich themselves and shut out others mind you... The desktop experience on Reddit needs to be protected at all costs, everybody is trying to turn Social Media into dictatorial Cable TV with Commercials (where you have no control over what you see) everywhere now.

wmidwestranger 3y ago

I'm not sure any platform can nosedive quite like slashdot. I'm not sure what the wreck looked like but the entire culture of slashdot and fresh meat seemed to disappear at some point.

spacecadet 3y ago
No, we just never really cared to rise above the noise...
crawancon 3y ago
surely Digg had a nosedive of unmatched proportions.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  How can we Digg Reddit? You are correct the nosedive of Digg was stunning in force and speed. I remember it so clearly.
- wmidwestranger 3y ago
  I do remember digg crashing because they were... Using the algorithm to get paid by advertisers and censoring posts, who could imagine? The downfall of Digg led directly to reddit and the death of Mr. Schwartz began reddits long path into slow enshitification.

pdntspa 3y ago

Anecdotally, it certainly feels worse with an inflection point around July. There are a lot more pop culture posts full of meme comments appearing in global top

to11mtm 3y ago

The SNR has dropped poorly on a lot of subreddits that are still active. One of my former favorites (the one I made an account for!) went from a very good and healthy moderation to a weird form of 'If we have to go into the thread more than once we have a short fuse for harsh enforcement of rules, nonpopular threads can still be cool though'. It will be very interesting to see what happens next year; historically election cycles tend to make SNR worse and people just break.

caslon 3y ago

> Heads up! This data is likely out of date or inaccurate now that Reddit has decided to kill the open ecosystem that existed around Reddit. I don't earn any money from this site, and if my calculations are correct it'd cost me a couple thousand dollars per month with their new API pricing, so yeah. If you can, it's probably worth leaving Reddit for other platforms - especially open-source/federated ones like Lemmy. It shows different stats because the API changed. DAU is likely higher than ever.

buildbot 3y ago
It doesn’t matter, because importantly, now they can game it however they need for their IPO. I stopped posting and know many others who did. The platform lost a lot and the front page is noticeably more trashy/Facebook like than it used to be.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > trashy/Facebook Don't mistake "bad for people like us" with "bad for business" — Duolingo appears to be doing fantastically well as a corporation despite having deliberately made themselves into something I found painful to use and therefore stopped using. Facebook is rolling in money despite being your example of bad. Tabloid newspapers sell very well.
  - buildbot 3y ago
    Oh I don't - I'm sure they will (probably) make plenty of money. Then again, TikTok seems more popular by the day across most groups of people I interact with - technical and non-technical millennials and boomers all use it very extensively in my group of friends and acquaintances.
- smrtinsert 3y ago
  Reddit died with the mobile clients.
thaumaturgy 3y ago
That message on subredditstats is more recent than the sharp drop; the drop appeared during and immediately after the protest, and the users didn't come back. The policy change took effect shortly after, and subredditstats only recently added that message to their pages (it wasn't there ~week ago). It also passes the sniff test. Pick any of the largest subreddits from the list and look at its front page. r/funny, with 54m "readers", has multiple posts on its front page right now with less than a dozen comments. r/news has more activity on its posts, but still far, far less than 2019. It's not like there's a thriving community on Reddit that makes subredditstats' numbers look wildly wrong.

4death4 3y ago

That’s really interesting data. But isn’t it possible less popular subreddits have picked up the slack?

_kulang 3y ago
Just have a a look through /r/all and compare to what it was before. Good moderation essentially led to well curated content. At the moment more subreddits contribute in my opinion worse content
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  /r/all has turned into a cesspit that makes 4chan look like the Library of Alexandria in comparison.
  - llbeansandrice 3y ago
    Yeah anyone trying to determine the outcome just by active users is missing the reality of what the platform has become.
- rzl1235 3y ago
  [dead]

dubeye 3y ago

The attempt to change policy completely failed. Wasn't a stalemate in any sense of the word

ben_w 3y ago
Pyrrhic victory for Reddit Corporation?
- nerdponx 3y ago
  Hardly Phyrrhic. "Noticeable in numbers" does not equate to even short-term financial damage, let alone harm to the longer-term financial outlook. Reddit Corporation won unambiguously, as expected by most reasonable observers.
  - Rastonbury 3y ago
    If those numbers are to be believed, it ruined any chance of their IPO for a couple of years. It's hard to sweep 'we lost 20%+ MAUs because of a policy change' under the rug when users/impressions are the lifeblood of a social media site
    - redserk 3y ago
      I’d wager the interest rate hikes and increasing conservative decision making around acquisitions has a greater impact on pushing back the IPO. Reddit killed off almost every third party app and had half of the site shut down for a few days, but still came out ahead with a site that’s still very active and with the bonus of pruning unpaid mods who would’ve been likely to disrupt the site again. Reddit’s only realistic time to IPO was mid-pandemic.
Arson9416 3y ago
We did it reddit![1] 1. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-did-it-reddit https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-did-it-reddit
Uptrenda 3y ago

Pathogen-David 3y ago

I took the protest as an opportunity to quit my 12 year Reddit addiction cold turkey and never came back, seems like I'm not the only one. Sometimes I miss /r/houseplants but I'm better off overall.

candiddevmike 3y ago
What did you switch to?
- nerdponx 3y ago
  I never found an equivalent alternative. I still log on to my local city subreddit occasionally (~1x/month) to see if there's any local news I missed. But otherwise I've just moved on to doing other things with my time.
- lupusreal 3y ago
  When I left reddit I didn't "switch to" anything. When I left I found it didn't leave a void that needed filling. When I was using I thought I needed reddit or something like reddit, but I was wrong. 7 years clean, I'm never going back.
- circuit10 3y ago
  I'm not the person you asked but I ended up replacing it with this site...
  - LesZedCB 3y ago
    me too...
- Pathogen-David 3y ago
  Reddit was a bad habit for me, so I've resisted outright replacing it. (I basically haven't even looked at Lemmy.) I mainly read Hacker News more than I used to and started reading Ask a Manager[0] regularly. A big benefit of both is that they aren't "bottomless" like Reddit so I won't waste too much time on them. AAM fulfills my desire to learn about others' lived experiences, but the relatively narrow topic range means it becomes uninteresting if I read the archives for too long. [0]: https://www.askamanager.org/ https://www.askamanager.org/

n2d4 3y ago

This is just straight misinformation. If you go on any of the "big subs" you linked, you'll see that there are far more comments than that per day. For example, in ELI5, by just taking the 5 most commented posts that were posted in the last 24h, they have 700 comments which is more than the peak that Subreddit Stats says they had since July. Instead, if you go on Subreddit Stats and read the text with the big red font, you'll see the explanation why the API changes have made such a difference: > Heads up! This data is likely out of date or inaccurate now that Reddit has decided to kill the open ecosystem that existed around Reddit. I don't earn any money from this site, and if my calculations are correct it'd cost me a couple thousand dollars per month with their new API pricing, so yeah. If you can, it's probably worth leaving Reddit for other platforms - especially open-source/federated ones like Lemmy. My assumption is the maintainer just hasn't edited their scraper at all, and it's now running into lots of rate limiting and missing most new comments and posts. The fact that subscriber growth has remained constant supports that thesis.

josefx 3y ago
> they have 700 comments which is more than the peak that Subreddit Stats says they had since July. So only down by two thirds, so they still have to double down if they want to outcompete X.
- n2d4 3y ago
  I compared a lower bound of actual comments to the upper bound of the number claimed by SRS. In reality, the number is much higher (by taking all posts instead of just 5, and including comments made today on posts that were posted yesterday).
namrog84 3y ago
I wonder how many of newer comments are coming from the proliferation of decent and accessible chat bots. Itd be easier than ever to pipe in stuff and get decent thing to comment. For bot farms and just personal curiosities.

Racing0461 3y ago

Is the data correct tho? Since its mos tlikely using the same api that was cencelled causing th eblackouts.

thaumaturgy 3y ago
I don't think it was ever precisely accurate in absolute terms, and it surely isn't more accurate now, but it appears to be accurate in relative terms -- i.e., as percentage changes in activity over time. A semi-random sampling of subreddits corroborates the conclusions of the data (that there are far fewer user contributions now).
- Racing0461 3y ago
  makes sense. if it was consistently inaccurate, the drop in traffic relative to the moving average would be captured.

praisewhitey 3y ago

add this to the list https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/ https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/

soulofmischief 3y ago

At the top of the page: > Heads up! This data is likely out of date or inaccurate now that Reddit has decided to kill the open ecosystem that existed around Reddit. I don't earn any money from this site, and if my calculations are correct it'd cost me a couple thousand dollars per month with their new API pricing

dicriseg 3y ago

I don’t go there more than once a week anymore because there isn’t a good mobile app. I previously doomscrolled Reddit for a couple of hours each day. It’s been great for me!

screye 3y ago

The exodus was worse than the numbers indicate. Platforms are heavily Pareto skewed.[1]. The top 5% of reddit users are the primary (posters, mods) and secondary (commenters) content creators who are responsible for 95% of the life on reddit. The protest was led by this top 5%, and I presume they're also the main group that atrophied. The scale of damage is therefore underreported in simple usage statistics. [1] I just coined the term, and I'm proud of it. Now shatter my dreams, and tell how it has already been around for decades.

wizzwizz4 3y ago
"Pareto skewness" appears in https://hal.science/hal-00700465 https://hal.science/hal-00700465 (doi:10.1109/asonam.2012.91) from 2012, though I'm not sure whether it has the same sense. Unfortunately, https://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/viewtopic.php?t=3194#post_content44019 https://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/viewtopic.php?t=319... from 2013 is a perfect match: > Etsy seems dominated by stores that sell nothing with a few that do rather well. It's severely Pareto skewed. This is a relatively rare use of language, so you might deserve co-invention credit.
- screye 3y ago
  I appreciate your effort in thoroughly destroying my dreams, yet politely giving me a consolation price. I'll take it !
manojlds 3y ago
Pareto screwed

Uptrenda 3y ago

Reddit mods have some of the worst reputations for power abuse on the entire internet. People in the comments are saying that many of these people quit with the implication that this is bad. But what if it's not? There are quite a few stories of these people being horrible gate keepers that pushed certain pet agendas. It's possible with these people out that new ideas can flourish and more people will be able to participate.

intended 3y ago
My constant answer to this is to volunteer oneself. Please. There are many subs, which lack mods and need to throw bodies at mod queues. If it helps, I’ve seen Reddit outreach programs to mods, and they used to respect the opinions of certain mods and subs. Spez recently joined a mod team. It’s enlightening, one of those “everyone should do this” kind of experiences. Reddit modding in particular is not just modding, but also community outreach and management, typically for text.
- Uptrenda 3y ago
  You can't just sign up as a mod though. The people who are mods are there because they were members of a select clique and when recruiting they're only going to choose similar people. The closest you can get to having an open process is starting your own sub but then: you've always been free to yell where no one can hear you.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  Why should or would any normal person work for free for a billion dollar company like Reddit? That's why they get the kind of mods that they have.

arp242 3y ago

That data seems wrong. I don't use Reddit much, but I checked the data aginast some smaller subs I sometimes check, and according to those charts they have just a few comments per day, but I know for a fact that's wrong. It's wrong for all subs I checked. For example: https://subredditstats.com/r/thethickofit https://subredditstats.com/r/thethickofit Just 3 comments for Nov 22, 8 for Nov 23. But how does that square with the existence of this thread from Nob 22 with 84 comments? https://old.reddit.com/r/thethickofit/comments/181d68u/ben_swain/ https://old.reddit.com/r/thethickofit/comments/181d68u/ben_s... And there's a bunch of other threads too! It's not just "a little bit wrong" it's completely wrong. That site seems about on the ball as a dead seal.

swores 3y ago
Maybe 81 of the 84 comments were either third party bot comments, or a Reddit-run LLM designed to make the sub look more active than it really is (the 2023, fewer people hours, version of what they did to launch the site), and subredditstats.com has detected that? I doubt that's the case, but just as there are sites that analyse an Amazon product's reviews to judge real vs. fake, it's not impossible that a Reddit comment counting serving could do the same.
- yorwba 3y ago
  It seems more likely that subredditstats.com detected that "This data is likely out of date or inaccurate now that Reddit has decided to kill the open ecosystem that existed around Reddit. I don't earn any money from this site, and if my calculations are correct it'd cost me a couple thousand dollars per month with their new API pricing, so yeah." given that that's what it says in the big wall of red text at the top.
- valianteffort 3y ago
  One of my favorite conspiracies is that reddit is mostly just LLM's and paid agents talking to eachother. Employed by various intel agencies, governments, and reddit themselves trying to astroturf and sway conversation in one direction or another.

akkartik 3y ago

I'm still off Reddit and Twitter, and plan to keep it that way no matter what. Gotta be the change you want to see in the world.

dv35z 3y ago
Because of your comment, I made to decision to delete my account. The underlying reason is that I want to shape my life where I only do business with organizations which prioritize (1) quality, (2) integrity, (3) excellent customer experiences. It’s got me thinking about other companies I’m currently doing business with, and how I can make decisions so that my values are put into practice by my actions & behaviors. Thanks!
crawancon 3y ago
same here fellow human. fight the power!
caskstrength 3y ago
This is the right approach and I did the same. Always surprised how many people here and on other sites whine and moan constantly about how they hate Reddit, Twitter and FB and can't seem to handle even slightest inconvenience to switch ("Oh Mastodon doesn't have a quote-tweet functionality, I can live without it!", "But-but-but my hiking group is on FB!", etc.). You can't argue with big tech companies, the only language they understand is reduced profit.

paulddraper 3y ago

It wasn't a "stalemate," Reddit got its way and the subreddits were reopened.

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paulddraper 3y ago
And despite some users leaving, is a steady #18 on SimilarWeb. That's not to say that Reddit has a great, glorious future. But by any quantifiable metrics, Reddit "won."

RickJWagner 3y ago

I wish that were true. I like some small hobby-related sub-reddits, I don't care if a lot people participate. The political trolls and haters are overwhelming. I wish they'd all drop off.

ClassyJacket 3y ago

That's not a stalemate, reddit just won.

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jimmytucson 3y ago

> sharp drop in July 2023 They shut off API access to their data around the very same time. Is that a coincidence?

pawptart 3y ago
No, and in fact, it's almost certainly the cause given the huge disclaimer on the linked page.

adra 3y ago

Poor, poor Slashdot. For me it was murdered during the 2016 US elections when they welcomed infectiously click bait political shit fest that literally spread to like every story. I contributed at that point for like 12+ years? I couldn't stand the vitriol and moderation clearly didn't function, so cest la vis.

barrysteve 3y ago
Metafilter too became black and white, politically divided in 2015. Murdered by politics.

rglullis 3y ago

It has been far from a stalemate. Reddit has won this battle, but the war is not over. Saying that as someone been dedicating full-time since September to a project to help people migrate from Reddit to Lemmy [0], the truth is that there is simply no alternative yet for all the niche communities that are established there. About a month ago, I posted here [1] about my project to try to make it easier to sign up and automatically discover/subscribe the Lemmy communities [2], but I wasn't expecting to have such a long tail of communities that need to be mapped out. The ~150 users that signed up to alien.top led to a discovery of about 6000 different subreddits. I was doing the work of curation and creating alternative communities by hand, but I realized that was going to be an endless task. This is why I started working on a crowdsourced solution [3], which I launched last Friday [0]: https://github.com/mushroomlabs/fediverser https://github.com/mushroomlabs/fediverser [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38007028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38007028 [2]: https://portal.alien.top/ https://portal.alien.top/ [3]: https://fediverser.network https://fediverser.network

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IAmGraydon 3y ago

It’s bad data. They changed the way they collect data when the price of API access went up. The drop you see in July 2023 isn’t real.

lopis 3y ago

> It's safe money that Reddit will now be a zombie platform That's just not the reality. I'm surprised and pleased to see that big subreddits suffered a significant decline, but I notice the number of subscribers continues to grow. Also, after the the dust settled, Lemmy activity really took a downturn. Small communities just can't survive the migration en masse. Whenever I need to look up something I still eventually need to check reddit, and most communities seem alive and healthy... The truth is, major subreddits are not what keeps reddit alive.

crossroadsguy 3y ago

I think in case of Slashdot and Digg et all there were places users went on to. In case of Reddit, while decline might true, there is no such “destination” or a path to migrate to. The users are either coming back or have never gone anywhere in the first place, because that “place” isn’t there. I have seen next to no engagement change in subreddits where the mods didn’t make it very difficult or impossible to engage (i.e either stayed neutral, or made notional changes and few posts). In fact growth as if been seen at normal rates, as if nothing happened.

deafpolygon 3y ago

I didn't perceive any sharp drop-- quite the opposite. The negative press drove more people towards Reddit. The average person didn't care about what the mods wanted.

mlrtime 3y ago

. Enough of the people responsible for posting and managing content left the platform to cause a noticeable impact on it. This is untrue from my pov. I see no change at all, /r/all is useless garbage memes. My custom page is mostly high signal. And the occasional tech search yields good results.

winternett 3y ago

Out of all the social platforms around, I think Reddit has the best model for organizing and segmenting content and user-based content control... I'm not referring to the mobile app of course, but the desktop version allows the user to control what they see for the most part, outside of not being able to block undesirable subreddits. With Ad Block (of course) it is fairly enjoyable, outside of the occasional unexpected (NSFW) snuff clips you see on it for absolutely no good reason. My preferred way of viewing reddit content when I am not using the old reddit desktop version with RES is usually on "redditp.com". Reddit is not great mind you, there's plenty of room for improvement, but it's a welcome break from the ultra-repetitive and deeply psychologically manipulative ad laced feeds that TikTok and Instagram have. Redditp.com is a video and picture scroller that is also customizable by modifying the site URL, so content from specific subreddits can be viewed on it by scrolling rather than by expanding each individual post. They really need a UI that allows subreddit titles to be selectable on it. They also need to reign in moderators that strictly control subreddits to enrich themselves and shut out others mind you... The desktop experience on Reddit needs to be protected at all costs, everybody is trying to turn Social Media into dictatorial Cable TV with Commercials (where you have no control over what you see) everywhere now.