Just in case anyone here was wondering how Reddit’s numbers are looking these days…
Data and visuals from https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit
Does that mean askreddit is good again?
Do you do the sex? What’s the saddest song ever? What’s the sexiest sex ever? Sad song? Sex?
Nope. It just means there are bots left chatting amongst themselves ;)
Ouch
Yeah, but I’m sure if you extend the graph to 0 it will… … … Ouch!
Not that I don’t appreciate the cynicism, but by killing the api, could be a major dropoff in bot accounts.
this is not an opinion that should be shared by anyone who has opened a frontpage comment section in the last 3 months. bot spam has only gotten significantly worse since july.
the API changes had no effect on bot accounts, anyway. reddit corp specifically made an exception for them and other “low volume” API users - which is why you can still use your own API key to activate defunct 3rd party apps.
(yes, the implication is that normal users can go to hell if they don’t want to use the app - but by imitating a bot, reddit gives you preferential treatment. they want bots juicing their activity metrics.)
my guess is that subredditstats.com is itself impacted by the API changes, or this is a consequence of frontpage posts cycling MUCH more slowly than they did before the protests. fewer individual posts reaching r/all means less traffic and fewer comments as a result.
they want bots juicing their activity metrics
Seems like it would have been easier to just not destroy third party apps given that their traffic numbers have apparently collapsed because of that.
yes it’s always easier to NOT fuck up a fully functional product and drive your userbase off a cliff, but that’s not good enough for the huge IPO that huffman is courting. he wants to be able to say “look, we’re monetizing 80% more MAUs than before and earning 45% more per person”.
frankly i doubt they’ll be able to go public at all at this rate. if i were the Newhouses (reddit’s owners through Advance Publications) i would certainly be looking for someone to unload this hot potato onto.
The worst part to me was how they completely ignored the glaringly obvious route to monetization of “oh you like using third party apps? You now have to pay us a subscription fee to use those” because while that would’ve been unpopular they would’ve gotten some users to pay up for sure, and I don’t think it would’ve been as harsh of an exodus of power users that drive engagement
Has it gotten worse, or has it stayed the same while real people left?
I don’t ask to be a jerk. I’m genuinely curious. I don’t roll over that way often anymore and when I do it’s always for super specific things so I don’t hit the front page.
it can’t really be evaluated in a vacuum. the front page moves so much more slowly that maybe it’s the same number of bots concentrated on a smaller number of posts, i dunno. i just know that it’s inescapable on popular posts and the bots have hardly needed to adapt because reddit corp doesn’t give a fuck.
And they’re still ranking #1 on the Comments per Day category with just 15k comments. I’d imagine they’re way bigger than that
I loved Reddit, until executives took a nosedive and their admins screwed my account over with a blatantly false suspension.
Swartz would be appalled at what Huffman has done.
I got banned from r/sports for talking about Australian Rules Football, I also got banned from r/Australia for showing a Simpson’s meme about taxes. So I left Reddit, 'tis a silly place
Ya at the end I was banned from so many of the subs I liked that I was like, why am I even bothering to comment here? Ive said it many times no ban should be forever, we dont put people in jail forever and we should not ban accounts forever unless they can be proven to be bots, but then they should just be blocked before they ever get access to the system. But I gave up trying to convince reddit of that face and just left, its a cesspool now.
I got banned because an egomaniac janny spammer I outed as a reactionary stalked me around the site and kept reporting my comments, and I got tired of appealing and having the admins ban their alts while allowing them to still operate on the site.
Basically they ran a bunch of political subs that appealed to Reddit’s userbase, but also had self-published a red/rape-pill book, and other actual copaganda materials that made light of police violence etc for police unions. They would ban anyone who mentioned this and report anyone who posted his other materials as doxxing attempts, even though they themselves would advertise the same materials and their own persona as a writer+comic artist.
i got perma banned once for… absolutely no reason. it got appealed when i asked why i was perma banned in my appeal
I got some of my OC removed on reddit. When that happened, I got a message from the sub’s moderators about the reason. Sometimes the reasoning did not make sense to me but in most cases it was in some way understandable. (I am also sure I must’ve pissed of a mod of the German sub because at some point they deleted whatever I posted…)
Anyway, what I want to say is: I got one OC post removed here on lemmy and was given no notification nor explanation. I only noticed it by accident. I hate it here.
Moderation log is public here - the reasoning you’re looking for could be in there.
Ah! Thank you. That is good to know.
They completely ignored my appeal. 0 response. Later that wrongful suspension was used to justify a permanent suspension.
Same here
I was recently permanently banned from a subreddit for being a “spam” account
I tried to reason with the mods but they didn’t listen
80% year on year drop is impressive
It’s almost like removing the third party apps that the majority of actual commenters and posters enjoyed was a monumentally stupid decision
I’m still sickened when I want to see a piece of media discussed and a few niggles with lemmy but I hate reddit now so I can’t go back.
Try geddit if you’re on android. It’s an app shell for reddits RSS feed. There’s no logging in, and thusly no voting or commenting, but it does allow you to create a front page and it lets you view the first like 30 comments. Also there’s no ads and NSFW content isn’t blocked. It’s pretty good for what it is and you don’t have to give Reddit money.
Find it on GitHub. I know you said you hate it and you’re never going back, and I’m right there with you, but it is nice to check in on some of my favorite Niche subreddits once in awhile
Thanks man
What the hell happened in the second half of 2020?
Bored people from the Coronavirus + US Election, if I were to hazard a guess?
Covid.
That was my immediate guess, but Covid blew up in March, and the Reddit graph doesn’t go crazy until a few months later. It is hard to see what else could possibly explain it though; I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s just an error in the axis labelling or something.
George Floyd was the end of May, then the protests and the election over the summer.
US election spam
George Floyd was murdered on May 25. COVID was ravaging the world. The presidential election cycle was in full swing. And I’m sure much more.
Anna I’m sure much more.
Hello fellow Gboard user. I would have also noticed “abs” in place of “and”.
Fucking thing gets worse every goddamned day. Thanks, lol
It does feel this way… but why?! Shouldn’t it be getting better with more training data? Is other people’s shitty typing data fucking up my experience?
Or maybe my swiping technique is getting lazy? I’m not sure, but it definitely feels worse than a few years ago.
It could be that the people’s typing (and therefore the training data) includes so many different unique movements that an “average” of all of them doesn’t actually look like any real person’s individual typing pattern. Sorta how some one-size-fits-all designs don’t fit any one person perfectly.
This seems plausible to me.
They should make it smarter and group users based on their swipe technique and have a separate model for each group.
If you make the same typo often enough and don’t correct it with the autocorrect feature (eg backspacing or jumping to the wrong character instead) Gboard will think it’s what you’re meaning to type and add it to your dictionary. When it comes up in the little autocorrect thing above your keyboard, you can drag it into the trash. You could also go through your dictionary and delete specific words as well. That’s what works for me anyways, not sure if I’m correct
Wait what? I can delete suggestions‽
Holy shit, I just tried it! WTF‽‽
Happy to help! Bonus tip, on Android you can hold the space bar down and slide the cursor left or right to bring it to specific letters too. On apple you can jump lines with the cursor by doing the same thing, just up/down instead
I would guess bot activity related to covid or any other american political thing
Reddit’s content has taken an absolute nose dive, I still lurk, but every time I think about posting, I close out the tab and leave now. The site has also become an ad filled dumpster fire.
To me it also feels like the ratio of low effort content posts or reposts VS original content has changed considerably. At least when browsing /r/all.
Yes and garbage subs being promoted as well… Like Outfits anD AITAH.
Same here
Reddit has gotten worse over time
It isn’t long before the final nail in the coffin gets hammered in
And it’s not just r/askreddit all subreddits I tried show a similar drop, including the ones that still seem relatively active.
This is most pleasing
I’m actually quite surprised by this, but satisfied nonetheless.
deleted by creator
Same
I’m still waiting for the day Reddit finally dies
That’s crazy
what happened in the 3rd quarter of 2020? from 0 to 200k comments, and then down again.
Outages I guess…
outages happen more frequently than that.
Blackout protest for George Floyd if I remember correctly, that might have been the previous dip in 2020 though.
US elections.
I find it very interesting that this is reportedly one of the top subs on all of Reddit: “Comments Per Day” ranks it #1, by Subscribers or Posts Per Day it is #2, Growth (Day) and Growth (Month) are both #5, Growth (Month) and Growth (Year) are both #4, etc.
Not only that, it is by far the top sub by this “Comments Per Day” metric: it shows 15828 Comments reported in a recent 24-hr period of time, whereas the next highest sub is r/worldnews with a mere 5153 Comments Per Day, then r/AmItheAsshole and r/nfl also ~5k, then others rapidly falling further like r/NoStupidQuestions and r/AITAH each ~3k, etc.
To reiterate: this is the #1 sub over all of Reddit, with >3x more comments per day than any other sub, and like more comments than the next 3 subs all combined… and it still has fallen off a cliff, even by this same exact metric.
I do not know how reliable subredditstats.com is overall, but even if it were not so good lately, so long as all the stats are more or less evenly biased across all the subs, we should still be able to learn something from these comparisons? (please add a correction if you know of some evidence that this is not true) One caveat is that it might be harder to compare now vs. pre-API changes? But if it can be believed, the numbers fell from a peak of >100k in June 2023, to a more average ~75k, then dropped like a rock in July to ~15k and has remained hovering around that area ever since…
I do not visit popular subs on Reddit anymore, just one that has refused to migrate to Lemmy/Kbin, but this sounds entirely believable to me. If you click the links to the top posts, the very title titles of the posts and top comments to them also showcase the change: like the #2 top post to that sub is “Now that Reddit are killing 3rd party apps on July 1st what are great alternatives to Reddit?” w/ 78.1k upvotes, and has the top comment w/ 5.2k upvotes of “I might get back into reading books after over a decade.” (and other comments likewise, pointing to Reddit alternatives, and angry exclamations about the 3rd party apps going away)
In short, THIS seems to be the evidence that we have been waiting for all this time, about just how far Reddit has fallen / died off?
Although comments on Lemmy/Kbin I do not think have risen by +~50k or so per day, so I wonder where all that Reddit traffic went? Possibly as the aforementioned comment said, it went offline, basically nowhere.
Edit: I tried to nominate this post to m/BestOf but even an entirely plain-text placeholder title with entirely plain-text body will not allow me to post there. It seems Kbin is broken right now (unfortunately no surprise there). Will someone other than the OP (that would not be allowed) who is not on Kbin like to submit this to that or similar magazines?
If you read the subreddit stats website, you’ll see a massive disclaimer at the top that the data is inaccurate after the API change because the site owner didn’t want to pay the new rates. I think a lot of people here are overstating how much reddit has changed since the API shutoff.
Believe it or not, that GIGANTIC, absolutely un-missable disclaimer was not there yesterday… or at least it did not show for me for whatever reason, definitely on mobile Firefox and I thought I had also looked on desktop but now could not swear to it. I cannot offer definitive proof but here’s a snapshot from Sept. 28 - not quite yesterday but long after July 1 https://web.archive.org/web/20230928153646/https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit but still is missing that disclaimer. In any case, thank you for the note of caution: possibly results might be comparable across subs but perhaps not pre- vs. post-API changes.
Possibly as the aforementioned comment said, it went offline, basically nowhere.
Probably depends on the audience. Discord for some, a bit of Lemmy, people maybe went back to old school forums too.
there is another site what the Reddit is Fun creator is gonna port their app for
What’s happened at the middle of 2023 there?
The Year of the Lemmy Desktop
Maybe a subreddit blackout
Alot of grass was touched apparently
A certain movie starring a certain actress was shown only in theater this July.
