Just in case anyone here was wondering how Reddit’s numbers are looking these days…
Data and visuals from https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit
Just in case anyone here was wondering how Reddit’s numbers are looking these days…
Data and visuals from https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit
Did the actual comments fall or did the tool get hit by the API change?
That depends on how it’s written. The fact that it’s not showing zero completely makes me think they’d been iterating over threads counting comments, and they’re hitting API limits. But that’s just a blind guess without having looked at their source code.
If that were the case, itd be a pretty sharp ceiling not a noisy one
If they’re only able to get the comment counts for a smaller number of threads, those individual numbers would be noisy but lower.
For example, before they got 100 threads with counts ranging from 0-100. Now they only get 10 threads with the same range of counts.
A bit of both I imagine.
Yes, a big factor, many users gradually left the site after the API changed. Also the sub mods have become increasingly ban-happy in the recent years.
The admins are banning anyone whi questions a mod these days, assuming they’re not puppets of them in the first place. Any sembalence of a distinction between mods and admins is gone
While you may be correct, I think op was referring to the the tool that counts the comments for this chart.
It maybe used the APIs to count comments and that’s why the sudden drop in the comments count. It just can’t count them as reliably anymore.
But it’s just a guess.
Subredditstats logs about 1/4 of the comments posted on a given subreddit. Pick any small subreddit and check its comments to verify for yourself. Takes about a minute. 25 comments/page. Old.reddit.com/r/____/comments
There is a big fat warning at the top of the page saying that the data is out of date, or innacurate due to the api changes
Funny enough, if it is an API problem, then this is one of the scenarios that a scrapper could easily solve the issue and grant accurate results again. A playwright script written by ChatGTP could do it.
I read reddit with a client that uses a scrapper now. The fuck is reddit gonna do, block Chromium? They said they wanted to stop this, well, congrats, they started it instead.