Watching the Reddit readers falling

[CarolineW]

Someone posted that people are unsubscribing from https://www.reddit.com/r/news/ so I set up a script to watch it.

Output has been as follows:

    20160612195100 8957564
    20160612195200 8957356
    20160612195300 8957145
    
    ...

    20160612222900 8936378
    20160612223000 8936240
    20160612223100 8936094

So from 19:51 (BST) to 22:31 (BST) there was a loss of some 21470 readers. That's roughly 0.24% in just 2 hours and 40 minutes. For reference, for the past (nearly) three hours they've been losing over 140 readers/minute.

Does it matter? Is it significant? It will be interesting to see what the numbers tomorrow morning (BST).

[CarolineW]

In case anyone is interested, here's the quick hack:

    #!/bin/bash

    echo $( date "+%Y%m%d%H%M%S" ) $( \
    curl -A ReaderCheck https://www.reddit.com/r/news/ 2> /dev/null \
      | grep -ho "<span class=\"number\">[0-9,]*</span>&#32;<span class=\"word\">readers</span>" \
      | grep -ho "[1-9][0-9,]*" \
      | sed "s/,//g" \
      | grep -v "^32$" \
      ) \
    | tee -a Reader.log

I'm sure there's lots wrong with it - don't really care, it's a throw-away.

[MilnerRoute]

Slashdot is covering Reddit's censoring of the discussion

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/06/12/2231213/world-reacts...

[ManlyBread → MilnerRoute]

The censorship on reddit, in general, is insane. There's a tons of deleting going on any time there's a topic that is just a little outside the political tastes of the moderators. Mods have no problem with purging 2000 comment long thread just because there's 100 comments that offend them. Some of them have a flat-out agenda and they're not afraid to show it at all.

[gravypod]

I switched from Reddit to here because, although HN does do what they call 'moderation', they are fairly transparent about the process.

And they were successful in not going too far with their 'moderation'.

I'd still be on Reddit had that platform been as easy to use and not taken to shitty 'moderation' tactics.

[ferrari8608 → gravypod]

Voat.co is worth checking out. It's like a smaller Reddit with an emphasis on preserving free speech.

[gravypod → ferrari8608]

I understand that but the website from last I checked loaded slow on my computer.

It was hard to use for my use case.

[ManlyBread → ferrari8608]

Give Voat a year and it will be nearly indistinguishable from reddit.

[GoToRO → gravypod]

"they are fairly transparent about the process"

They do hellban people so no, they are not transparent.

[collyw → gravypod]

I find HN better for higher level discussion, but Reddit is far more accepting of humorous comments.

[hackney]

Reddit, imo, is a joke for the simple(ton) reason that 90+% of new posts are nothing more than stupid questions. I created an acct. for the sole purpose of filtering the garbage, which apparently is the majority of the content.

[cableshaft → hackney]

Used to be all over reddit, but now I only check r/boardgames with any regularity. As the other person who replied to you said, the niche subreddits aren't too bad, but the main subreddits attract no end of stupid comments.

[collyw → hackney]

It depends entirely on what subreddits you read. The technology based ones are usually OK, as the niche ones. The more mainstream ones are pretty crap.

[brador]

For those wondering why this was done - "to prevent copycats from taking similar actions" is my guess.

There is evidence to suggest such events can "inspire" others to do the same.

I don't know why the mods have not clarified this as the reason, maybe admins sent the message and told them to keep silent, maybe it's even higher.

[shivsta]

I was a long time Reddit user and have recently stopped using it for my intellectual entertainment in favor of HN. I still use Reddit for my dose of humor and videos - that's what's so great about it - you can unsubscribe and curate your content to fit your needs.

[bjourne]

You are likely watching actions of bots.

[tubularhells]

At least we still have 4chan, amirite?

[cup]

If news is the same a worldnews then hopefully the vocal racists are the ones leaving and the quality of news increases.

[jacoblambda → cup]

Supposedly from what I have seen it is due to a liberal application of shadowbans.

[strathmeyer → jacoblambda]

For some reason all the Trump supporters are upset that their vitriol is not acceptable in the real world so they have been targeting the /r/news mods. They have been doing a large amount of rule breaking behavior of the past months, mocking the other mods and admins, hoping to get banned, because they love to cry about censorship. It's amazing what a tizzy they have wound themselves up into based upon totally made up information.

Subreddits such as /r/the_donald were brigading the threads and hiding valuable information such as where people could donate blood.

[btdiehr → strathmeyer]

The thread on where to donate blood was deleted by /r/news mods.