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.
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.
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.
I still have mod status on a large-ish (70k+) subreddit so I can view reddit's internal traffic statistics for it, and these estimates are definitely wrong.
These stats claim the sub has had 10-20 comments per day in just the past month, so maybe 300-600 tops.
In reality it's had 1200+ comments just in the past week alone and probably closer to 5000 for the month. And you can see the activity with your own eyes in every thread, so I definitely trust reddit's own stats more.
Did you participate in the blackout? What was your impression of it? Were any of the tools you used impacted by the API ban?
I think a much more effective strategy would be a user-led LLM "spamming" campaign.
Package up a lightweight, easy to use LLM for Windows users and let them turn their accounts into noise. Purposely generate overly-argumentative, blatantly wrong prose on every subject and in every subreddit.
Reddit would hate that. Just a hundred users engaging in it could probably tank the quality of the whole site.
I don’t go on Reddit that much anymore and I haven’t been active as a mod on that sub for a very long time. But based on my experience doing it, users are quite good at identifying stupid bullshit and reporting it to mods, which makes it easy to spot. Plus they downvote low quality comments like crazy so it gets buried and people don’t even see it.
Because of those things Prank spammers usually don’t last long. Usually a small gang of people will try something like that and you can quickly ban them. They might try to come back on new accounts but eventually tire of it and find another way to keep themselves busy. The mod queue feature is quite efficient so we can ban reported junk much faster than they can post.
I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, but it would be more difficult than you might think. If you try to automated completely it would cost you an awful lot in fees (Open AI’s server bills are “eye-watering“ and if you go past the free limit they start passing that cost onto you), and the admin’s would probably be able to identify the accounts doing it and ban them site wide.
While an interesting idea, the problem is that the majority of users would be more bothered by it and they simply don't care enough about Reddit's management to fight it.
> I think a much more effective strategy would be a user-led LLM "spamming" campaign.
Also hugely immoral.
If you don't like Reddit and decide to not use it: fine, your choice, obviously.
But completely fucking over a platform because you don't like it? That's an entirely different thing. Who are you exactly to decide how Reddit runs it site?
This is just a DDoS attack, but in a slightly different form.
You're right, and it'll probably become outlawed by legislation (or be caught by existing protections).
Reddit and its userbase have always been on the activist spectrum (SOPA, PIPA, CEO changes, API changes, etc.) And before it, Digg was much the same. Given the fact that they'll brigade r/Place with automation tools and protests, I'm surprised it hasn't happened in the form of a broader protest.
This is true. But we are also up in terms of page views per month, unique visitors, etc., etc. reddit has probably been getting gradually bigger each year for as long as I can remember, and it doesn’t look like that trend has peaked off yet. At least not the subs I have access to.
Yes, still. I’m a mod on a few other decent sized subs (30k-ish) actually and most of them are still growing, unless the topic at hand is clearly outdated.
Reddit throttled its API usage a month before the great 3rd party purge, so I'm guessing whatever collection method that site was using simply doesn't work correctly anymore. Or worse yet, the remnants of the API spits out completely incorrect data itself.
Sounds like Reddit itself has recovered in terms of raw numbers, but I (and others) have noticed yet another downtick in quality. Lot more bots (AI craze doesn't help. And despite the API narrative being used to counter them, they probably suferent the least), comments seem to be as hostile as early pandemic. But these are hard to measure objectively.
I'm on reddit a lot less these days, but subjectively it seems about the same for me, except most of the old subreddits I'm a legacy mod on are way busier than I remember. They're definitely still gaining users.
It could just be that the longer you're on there, the worse the quality appears to get to you as newcomers come. People always start to feel that way after being there some time. But then again people have been complaining about the quality of reddit going down literally almost as long as reddit has existed.
In my opinion Reddit has a content problem in the same way 24 hour news does. Simply put, there's not enough content to put up constantly so it's supplemented with repeating memes, reposts, and drama.
At the end of the day it comes down to the upvotes, though. If the other users are on your wavelength, you’ll probably like whatever they recommend. But over time you could have less in common with the average user there, meaning what they upvote will be less relevant to you too.
Bots seem to be more prevalent everywhere. For example, I’d say roughly 3/4ths of the followers on my twitter are obvious bot accounts with names like battery48462628 and that have either no comments at all or random Chinese foods and city pictures with captions like “flowers are the spice of life”.
For what it's worth: many of the NSFW subreddits are dead. Even r/gonewild, one of the OGs - either they've gotten closed due to being unmoderated or they've been overrun by onlyfxns spam, or they've been hit by some weird downranking like GW.
Particularly the nsfw loss hits hard for those interested in niche communities. We've lost tumblr, never had any of the Meta (FB, Instagram) views, Reddit is holding on on threads, Pornhub went down in flames following their outright incompetence, and Twitter has gotten a hellscape from EM's hopeless attempts to keep the spammers away (and his other antics).
I suspect this is the bigger issue to be honest. I certainly stopped because of this. Not that I begrudge people having OF or advertising that, but please, for fuck's sake, stay on-topic, and don't spam the fuck out of things with content barely related to the sub's topic.
I also really hate the shift in language to be more personal; e.g. "would you like to [..]" / "I would like YOU to [..]" and stuff like that. It's just creepy and manipulative. Sell your pr0n pics, fine, but don't pretend we have some sort of personal relationship, because we don't.
It works though. There's millions of horny, lonely suckers out there - if you're an OF creator, all you need to do is to catch a few good whales, just like with free-to-play games.
Particularly where "weird" fetishes are involved, the rates for custom content can be pretty exorbitant, but still a drop in the bucket for the clientele.
The thing is, that was the desired outcome anyway. Reddit wants to get rid of the NSFW because the big money they want to attract doesn't like anything remotely fringey.
I wonder where those posters went to though. Lemmynsfw is nice but very sparse.
Ps OnlyFans spam was killing it for longer already
I imagine that will be the upcoming drama after the looming "payout reddit karma" drama passes over. Reddit's been hostile to NSFW posts and I think at some point soon-ish (1-2 years) they are going to pull a tumblr as well. That will be when the site really starts to die.
I just hope the fediverse or any other alternative is preparing itself for that next big drama. Because I feel it's a matter of when at this point, not if.
> I just hope the fediverse or any other alternative is preparing itself for that next big drama. Because I feel it's a matter of when at this point, not if.
The question is, does the Fediverse want this level of responsibility? Moderating ordinary content is hard enough, moderating porn is worse because of all the legal liability: various countries have extremely strict laws regarding access of minors (e.g. Germany), there are various definitions of CSAM (again, Germany being very strict by banning not just anime "minors" aka lolicon but also textual erotica of such), then there is the issue with "revenge porn" and getting that deleted across the Fediverse...
It will definitely be controversial, yes. I think even now in its infancy, porn is one of those topics that causes servers to draw lines in terms of federation, so it will definitely intensify if/when Reddit purges porn.
But at the same time, I doubt all instances will clamp down and ban it. It brings a lot of traffic and I'm sure many moderators have strong free speech vallues and will defend it under that banner. It's extra work but some will take it up. There will most definitely be NSFW-dedicated instances in the worst case.
You should probably also point out the big red text on the subredditstats pages. I didn't see it when I posted the links, since I'm colorblind and hues of red are entirely invisible to me. Also I have trouble counting past the number of fingers on my hands, so I didn't notice that the numbers were a bit off. If I had noticed that, I still would've needed one of the very clever people here to explain the significance.
A little bit of snark, not directed at you specifically. Several people now have pointed out either the red text at top, or that the numbers aren't an exact match, or both, without themselves bothering to read through this thread to see if those had already been discussed.
IIRC there was just one comment when I posted that (but others may have been posted in the 10 or 15 minutes it took me to write that), and I still feel my comment adds value, because "likely to be wrong" in the warning seems like a rather weak phrasing (can also mean it's correct!), as are some of the other "I think this may be wrong" comments I see here.
I also suspect that smaller subs are a more useful measure than these huge subs, because I'd expect them to die off much quicker than the huge ones with a lot of inertia.
That said, I understand it can be annoying having 16 people tell you you're wrong all in slightly different ways. It's the price of posting on the internet I'm afraid. But it was (and still is!) the top post on this thread, even though it's not just factually wrong, but spectacularly factually wrong – which is fine, everyone is wrong sometimes – but people do have the tendency to point that out. As long as it's not a pedantic point I don't think that's wrong even if there's a comment already, if you think you can make that point better.
So, I don't think it's wrong in a way that matters for this discussion.
The data is useless as an absolute measure of activity, sure, as described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425501. The message at the top of the main subredditstats page says, "...the data collector is not robust, and so the numbers should only be used as a general guide." You can read that. Let's assume I can read that, too.
But it does track as a representative sample of trends. Picking something less noisy than a niche sub, we can ask whether there have been recent newsworthy events that might show up as spikes in this data. And, there is: look again at the posts/day and comments/day graphs on https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews, and you see clear spikes in activity right around October 7 -- well after Reddit's API changes would have affected subredditstats.
If the data collector has only been able to pick up, say, approximately 20% of the site's activity for each subreddit, then trends are still trends as long as the data collection hasn't changed in a radically new way. And, sure, that could be the case after Reddit's API changes, but as I pointed out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425150 (and as supported in another user's reply using an entirely different source of data), the API changes don't line up precisely with the change in user activity, and Reddit is clearly, observably, less active now in all of its large subs.
Now, for my part, I assumed this would all be pretty obvious stuff. I'm not doing a terribly deep analysis here; I'd expect anyone else to see the same things at a glance. But a few people seem to think that because the numbers aren't a perfect match, the entire point just collapses and clearly Reddit is now busier than ever, and those people are completely missing the point. Using a 12,000-subscriber sub with the noisiest possible data to try to disprove sitewide trends is even more wrong, and then smugly saying, "everyone is wrong sometimes", is not just condescending, but frankly embarrassing.
The diametrically opposing argument here is that Reddit is perfectly healthy and the API changes and blackout protest had no significant impact on the site, and that checks notes 12,000 subscribers in r/thethickofit are sufficient evidence for this. And, like, okay, if that's your argument, cool, carry on, just come out and say so.
I don't think there is a fundamental problem with reddit's userbase for smaller communities. But I think that we should avoid centralized platforms at all costs. Sooner or later, you will realize that "your" sub is not really yours and that you just gave a lot of your time and work for someone to exploit the data mine.
Put aside peer pressure for a moment, couldn't you create your community on Lemmy to make sure that you are always in control of your social media presence?
I wish I could give you a great answer. But my country is not really tech savy in a sense, that it even takes convincing to have them sign up over to Reddit from Facebook.
Yeah not sure how it works over there with new platforms and everything but that won’t just fly here.
to be fair, we are saying this on yet another centralized platform. It's just that HN doesn't pretend to be "my/your" community.The upside is that at least the mods here are paid ones who won't ban you based on their particular mood that day.
I do browse the fediverse and am somewhat ambivalent so far. It's definitely at a crossroad point where the next 2-3 years will determine whether it's the next Blender, or the next Gimp. And my biggest fears is that usability won't be prioritized in order to ensure that it won't be the next GIMP. There's a lot of core UX to rework to make it more intuitive.
The obsession is not with "others making money", but "others making money by being Surveillance Capitalists" and "neutralizing oligopolies whenever possible".
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.
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.
>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
Even if this was true (which I seriously doubt), how can you prove that, and what makes you think the subredditstats website cited above would be able to tell the difference?
The operator freely admits his/her stats probably underestimate real traffic due to the expense of collecting data, and they make no claim to having software to detect real commentors from fake. Meanwhile the real internal reddit stats available to mods show numbers that are both much higher and much closer to the live traffic we can see for ourselves as readers.
Yeah, that's a load of bollocks. 90% of that sub is just people quoting applicable insults from that TV show at each other, most of which probably won't make sense if you haven't seen the show. This isn't something that's easy to mindlessly spam LLM-spam at. Actually, many probably won't pass ChatGPT's profanity filter; ChatGPT says:
> The insults in the show are often colorful and inventive, but they can be quite explicit. Due to their explicit nature, I won't provide a verbatim quote here
You can ask it to not filter profanity, but it seems I need to do it every other message. In general ChatGPT is about as useful as a marzipan dildo here.
I'm willing to bet that exactly 0% of the content of that sub is LLM generated, and the same for most of those smaller subs. Who even cares about these tiny subs? Certainly not Reddit.
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.
While this is absurdly conspiratorial, there is a grain of truth to it: early on in Reddit's history, the admins created fake accounts and posted on them to boost engagement[0]. More recently, after the blackout and user exodus, /r/de noticed a bunch of new German-language copies of popular English-language subs being created with a bunch of autotranslated comments[1]. So Reddit's administration is not above creating fake accounts and content to juice numbers.
How much of Reddit's engagement is faked is up for debate - I suspect it's less than we think. However, it'd be really funny if, say, when Reddit IPOs, someone at /r/WSB catches onto this and triggers a bunch of people shorting the stock.
It's one thing to add stories to a startup website and created the illusion of a couple dozen users instead of just zero. But all these years later Reddit has millions and millions of unique users per month and is still one of the top ten most visited websites in the US and has been for many years, beat out only by google/meta properties and wikipedia etc. You can fake "activity" internally but it's harder to fake stats calculated by independent evaluators.
And if it wasn't, everybody would be doing it. What makes you think reddit would have an advantage in doing that over anyone else?
It's not that Reddit is faking their own stats. The conspiracy theory is that these fake users are created by various non-Reddit organizations to promote an agenda, sell stuff, gather intelligence, etc. Reddit's level of awareness and complicity is secondary.
Wouldn’t those same people just do the same thing everywhere on social media across the Internet though? Because if so it’s still doing well in the relative rankings.
They specifically reposed users content from other platforms then pinged them that it was being discussed on reddit. It's what caused me to use reddit for the first time.
This is why I say that anonymous sites like Reddit are not Social Media. If I am on there, there is zero proof that anyone else commenting is a human. They all could be bots and I have no way to prove otherwise.
On some of the niche travel-related subs like r/bikepacking, it’s actually quite common to run into one’s fellow redditors in real life on some popular route around the world. You definitely know the high-value posts are coming from real people. Some posters aren’t anonymous at all, because they also have linked YouTube or Instagram accounts that use their real name and face. And from e.g. the person’s gear, the past travels they describe, or the internet drama they have witnessed, it’s easy to identity a person you run into as a fellow member of the sub.
You are axiomatically not wrong about bots. That's what all the platforms in the Reddit genre do to fill content voids. It long predates sophistication like LLMs. It's like bots in a poker room site. The UX would suck without them.
But Reddit probably has the scale to do without in popular parts of the site.
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.
Reddit opened up a world of computer programming to me back in 2007. I read blogs and books I'd never of heard of otherwise. It expanded my world view. I wish I'd been reading it when I was 14 instead of 25 after I finished university (I scrapped by in a shitty IT degree). I would have focused on maths and programming. It expanded my world view and opened me up to a lot of good influences.
Yeah it has an addictive dark side. Also most of the user comments went to shit years ago. But overall a net win for me.
Many of the technical and science stuff is still pretty good. Not like it used to be, but it's a recurring theme, when the Internet expanded, UseNet also became rubbish, "infested by AOL'ers and spam" was the complaint in 1996.
Yup, same here. Also spent quite some time on it. Very pleasant surprise how easy it is to stop. Had a similar experience recently with youtube, worked well too.
Last week I clicked some link leading to reddit, I was surprised I am still logged in.
Why do you think spending time on HN is better than Reddit?
Serious question, because I’m not sure I understand. Hope it doesn’t come off as antagonistic. I too wonder if the negative things Reddit does to me outweigh the positive, but never considered it was unique to Reddit rather than being true about all anonymous online communities.
Hacker News has much less content and less content diversity. I very rarely go beyond the first page of HN, and only like a quarter of the posts at most are something that I'm interested in enough to actually spend time looking at.
The velocity of HN is also much lower than Reddit. If I check the front page again an hour from now it'll be mostly the same set of posts.
It also helps that comment sections here are smaller and that HN doesn't have pictures or other easily-bingeable content.
HN is also less likely to get me worked up over nothing. Partially because the comment section is more mature, partially because the community doesn't regularly discuss topics that get me worked up.
Edit: Another thing that came to mind: If I do accidentally visit HN too often, seeing nothing new on the front page make me realize I'm checking it too often and helps me realize I need to focus better or seek out something more productive to do.
Thanks for sharing. Makes sense and I can relate to many of the things you say about Reddit (too bad it’s so hard to do things in moderation these days).
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.
I like the idea of replacing the time I spend on Reddit with blogs that provide new insights.
One big place I’ve found Reddit helpful in recent years is a niche community about a chronic illness I have. Initially for collecting more information and insights than I can get in a 15 minute doctor appointment, then a sense of community and realizing I’m not alone, and then over time by giving me a chance to pay it forward by sharing information with others. Last few weeks I’ve realized ChatGPT can be helpful for the first one. The second I’ve started to shy away from because I’ve realized I don’t want the condition to be a core part of my identity, and the third there might be better ways to achieve (likely offline).
Think you’ve inspired me to get off of it for a while. Thanks!
Hopefully nothing, since they described it as an addiction and mentioned they’re now better overall.
But your question isn’t atypical, which is weird when you think about it in comparison to any other addiction. If an alcoholic said they stopped drinking, asking what drug they replaced booze with would be a weird and possibly insensitive question.
This reminds me a lot of discussions I've had with people over the years about why I'm an atheist.
For many, it seems like religion fills an important void in their life. When they imagine me without a religion, they see me having that hole. But I never felt an absence in the first place. I didn't adopt a religion the same way most people don't, say, adopt a giraffe. I never woke up with "the pain of giraffe-less-ness", so never decided to get a giraffe.
I don't think anyone was asking "What addiction did you replace your addiction with." I interpreted it as more of a "What better habit did you replace your addiction with."
I actually read it as the former, but I found it amusing more than insensitive.
That being said your interpretation is much more charitable, although I also don't currently feel like I have a great answer to that variant.
I've definitely made an effort to get out of the house more often, and I've been better at getting my less interesting house projects done.
I have a few hobbies I want to explore further (especially music stuff) but that's on hold while I job search after making the decision to move on from contract work. (Hobbies tend to consist of "learn a new thing" and my brain will always gravitate towards learning a new thing over stressful work like job searching.)
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.
For me, mindlessly heading to reddit have been replaced by equally mindlessly heading to either here, discord, twitter, or bluesky. Overall I think the variety is probably a net positive, even if I haven't addressed the root issue of spending time mindlessly.
Mindfully heading to reddit (relying on various subreddits as a resource for product reviews or technical support) is even more varied: gaming sites instead of r/games, googling for product reviews instead of heading to a niche subreddit, etc. I'll also visit reddit if it's a promising google result, but resist the old habit to add "site:reddit".
Lemmy is pretty great and I still use it now and again, but I've mainly just stopped consuming content in that way. I subscribed to a quality newspaper for news / analysis / opinion; I stay on HN for the technical news & discussions.
Honestly once you break the (to me addictive) loop of opening reddit/lemmy you're not missing out on much. Whenever I get a reddit search result it redirects to my selfhosted libreddit instance (connect through tailscale). Public libreddit instances are basically always broken, but a single user one which is just used for the occasional search result works perfectly fine.
Not the parent, but ClickSpring is one of my favorites, though they don’t post much anymore. Also, ThisOldTony. BenEater, TechnologyConnections, Jeff Geerling, GreatScott!, Wintergatan, bigclivedotcom, JK Brickworks, The 8-Bit Guy, and Usagi Electric are more on the tech side of my subscriptions.
It would be great if there was an easier way to share subscriptions.
If you like ThisOldTony, give InheritanceMachining a shot. Similar explanations of machining, clean shots, regular posts (every 2 weeks), and you can often see him using previous builds when making the next thing.
I grew up with ZackFreedman. We were good friends as kids for a year or two, but then lost touch. Remember hearing vaguely that he had gotten into stuff like this a couple years back.
I'm going to hit up my history and looks like it's mostly just the basics when it comes to "general" makers.
BPS Space, Simone Giertz, Stuff Made Here, DIY Perks, Aaed Musa, This does not compute, rctestflight, Tom Stanton, lftkryo, upir, Nerdtronic, Design Prototype Test
And then just stuff I like - Adrian's Digital Basement, Cathode Ray Dude, Retro Recipes, Tim Traveller, Dave's Garage
I am heavily addicted to YouTube now that I've curtailed my Reddit use. I get a tremendous amount of value, educationally and professionally. The trouble is that there's no good content filter in place, and a couple of mindless clicks later and I'm in a tidal wave of imbecilic, mind rotting, dopamine-inducing distractions.
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.
I'm spending some time on Tildes now, but the real answer is that I replaced it with not using social media much anymore. None of my niche subreddits really left so I just don't follow things I care about anymore.
> 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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
The last moderator uprising killed the ceo (metaphorically speaking) so the latest one doesn’t seem to have done much in comparison. If they’ve stopped growing and started shrinking that’s bad, but ultimately there’s no replacement yet so don’t sign their death certificate.
> 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.
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.
In 2022, The top show has 21,000 votes and 4,000 comments. 2 others have more than 1,000 comments, 4 have more than 4,000 votes, and 13 have more than 300 comments, including the 16th most popular show.
In 2023, the top show has 4,231 votes and 700 comments. 1 other show have more than 4,000 votes, 1 has more than 1,000 comments, and 8 are above 300 comments.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
. 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.
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
Here's a fun thing to look at, https://subredditstats.com/ for any major subreddit, e.g.:
https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews
https://subredditstats.com/r/explainlikeimfive
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.