Just in case anyone here was wondering how Reddit’s numbers are looking these days…
Data and visuals from https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit
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Not sure I believe it. A drop off like this is absolute death spiral territory, and the exodus of users would be way more clear, as places like here would have exploded in new accounts. These people aren’t just going to go outside, so where are the commensurate rises in activity on other websites?
Yeah that kind of a drop looks more to me like a change in reporting
It could also be a very good explanation. Too bad that this site doesn’t document its methodology and that reddit will never confirm such numbers.
However I am still certain that quality has dropped overall on most subreddits. An acceleration of what started a while ago.
They did change the API right around then, which is how this data would get pulled.
a) a lot of accounts are bots, and depending on how they are implemented, a LOT of these have remained (or even were created) after the API changes - remember, it’s easy to spin up 1000s of these to each provide small traffic so as to not run up against the API limits. Overall, I suspect a ton more bots are there now, b/c the bot defense effort was suspended, b/c unlike a single bot, that one needs to look at ALL traffic (I suppose it could be re-written from scratch in a decentralized manner but… the developers did not choose to do that).
b) a lot of people who remain on Reddit, including myself, offer it WAY less traffic than before. I used to be a mod of a small sub, which I quit, so I went from checking it almost literally hourly, so at most once a day, and most days I do not even comment at all. Also, I used to browse r/all (actually, “popular”), but now I never do, instead preferring Lemmy/Kbin for that. My personal traffic dropped off a cliff just like this image shows, in fact probably a lot more so. Although I still do visit that small gaming sub, b/c while there is a version of it here, instead of like 5 posts a day we get at most 1 per week, which less than a handful interact with. So that is not an “exodus of users” so much as a (vast) reduction of interaction, which still impacts their advertising revenue and thus the continuity of Reddit as a corporate entity.
c) as people are saying, not everyone came to Lemmy/Kbin. Some went to Mastodon, others just stopped going online as much, and like myself I comment now a lot less than I used to, though I read just as much (here, not there). So just b/c the traffic did not come “here”, does not mean that it did not leave “there”. i.e., think of the shock of the event as making people regress more to lurking and not feel as comfortable interacting, especially given the lack of ability of smaller magazines (what are those called on Lemmy again?) here. Thus, even if they did not “go outside”, they still may not be interacting on Reddit.
People asking this often forget that spending less time online is an option as well. I would say I was pretty addicted to reddit doomscrolling between 3 and 8 hours per day. I exclusively use Lemmy now and doomscrolling just does not work here, so I spend 30-60 min per day here and have much more time to read books now, something I wanted to pursue more for a long time.
Me too:-)
Edit: well, okay so not 3-8 hours every day, but it still was better to cut back.:-)
Well, I started just playing more my game backlog on Steam and finding other things to do that wasn’t scrolling the interwebs most of the time. I come here, sure, but no where near as much as I did on reddit, and I don’t comment here nearly as much as I did there either.
I quit reddit when they started charging for API. I started engaging with my local library. I’m 35 years old and started reading my local newspaper for the first time ever in my life.
I came back to Reddit only to discover lemmy and now I read both my local news and lemmy.
It’s been nice. Calmer, less stressful. It feels good again and I realize now that I’ve been very unhappy with reddit for many years now.
I actually did stop engaging as much after eliminating Reddit. Lemmy is nice sometimes, but I’m nowhere near as active. I probably post a few more YouTube comments, that’s about it.
Yeah same here. I used to comment on reddit multiple times a day, I comment on Lemmy maybe once or twice a week. There’s just not as much here that inspires me. It’s okay, though, and I’m reading more books.
It’s certainly a bit thick on the memes, but it’ll flesh out as it matures.
I think we can agree the alternatives we’ve found have been much more positive overall.
So many more books : )
Yeah great innit? I always used to be a reader and I’ve been rediscovering old favourites and reading a bit of new stuff. I have limited screen time after work and life etc but I’ve also been doing the same with films. And there’s a load of games on my list too. I’m not saying reddit was a waste of time, but I’d spend an hour or two a day on there, was constantly in ongoing conversations with a bunch of people. Lemmy is much less so. Social media is good n stuff, I’m gonna stick with Lemmy for a bit - but yeah, books etc :)
Same. I check Lemmy once or twice a day and comment less than on Reddit by far. I still feel more satisfied than I ever did on Reddit and I enjoy the community much more.
I don’t think all of those people just up and stopped using Reddit. My guess is a lot of them stopped engaging or even logging in and just lurk these days.
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Something like 80% of reddit users don’t interact at all and like 80% don’t comment. So a tiny portion of reddit users actually generate comments.
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Comments don’t tend to be linear, more comments drive more people to engage which means more comments, so it forms a near exponential curve
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Other websites HAVE seen and explosion in activity. Look at a similar graph for lemmy and you’ll see a huge rise. Maybe not 1 to 1, but enough that if you extrapolate the same to other websites you can account for all the missing users.
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The whales stopped posting, since those were most affected by the API ban.
The rest of the users are still there, but the content is just limited now.
I’m actually quite surprised by this, but satisfied nonetheless.
Same
I’m still waiting for the day Reddit finally dies
Nothing ever truly dies on the Internet, unless it’s a Google service. /s
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I was commenting regularly. Now I comment here, sorry y’all.
Ditto
I think that’s what has surprised me the most. When I moved here after the API shutdown, things seemed pretty slow. But now it seems activity is really picking up. I would be very interested to see the fediverse growth rate vs. Reddit’s when it first started. I’m just surprised to see how quickly things are changing here.
The momentum is strong. It’s rather exciting to see and be part of. We are the change we wanted.
The best part is now all the foundations are here too so when the next big ‘event’ happens Lemmy will be in an even better position to absorb all those users.
You’re right. It was rough at first. A lot of outages, confusion, etc. But more people on now, more hand-holding for newbies, etc. It’ll be easier to adjust I feel.
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.
Same here
Reddit has gotten worse over time
It isn’t long before the final nail in the coffin gets hammered in
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.
What the hell happened in the second half of 2020?
I would guess bot activity related to covid or any other american political thing
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
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.
US election spam
George Floyd was the end of May, then the protests and the election over the summer.
Bored people from the Coronavirus + US Election, if I were to hazard a guess?
I do visit Reddit on occasion (with Adblock) but I haven’t made one comment or one post since I lost Apollo. Why? I deleted all history then deleted the accounts. I can’t even upvote and that’s my little protest still in full swing.
Same. It’s unavoidable to use it when it turns up in Google searches or for niche content, but I’ve 100% stopped contributing.
The corporate world undervalues goodwill, both from their customers and their employees.
That’s bound to go away on its own as people stop contributing and Google devalues it in favor of newer content.
Exactly why I stopped contributing as well.
I’m the opposite, read with adblocks then just downvote the entire first 100 threads which are basically half porn now lol.
You mean the API changes that stopped the only source of these statistics from collecting them stopped effectively collecting them?
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.
US elections.
Blackout protest for George Floyd if I remember correctly, that might have been the previous dip in 2020 though.
Did they opt out of appearing in all? I know a subreddit that had a similar drop after doing it.
That’s crazy
Wow I didn’t know it dropped off a cliff like that in July
Has the community changed much during that time?
Yes. Drastically. It is almost as big of a difference as when Reddit flipped, overnight, from pro Bernie to pro Clinton in the 2016 election.
Comments and post quality took a nose dive. And I don’t mean the typical summer change, I mean drastic and significant change.
Did the actual comments fall or did the tool get hit by the API change?
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.
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.
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
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.
Yes but then what? When you hit the API limit you’re fucking done… There should be big gaps every time this scenario triggers unless what, they have api keys for each sub or something lol
As of July 1, 2023, we will enforce two different rate limits for those eligible for free access usage of our Data API. The limits are:
If you are using OAuth for authentication: 100 queries per minute (QPM) per OAuth client id If you are not using OAuth for authentication: 10 QPMQPM limits will be an average over a time window (currently 10 minutes) to support bursting requests.
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16160319875092-Reddit-Data-API-Wiki
so maybe it’s not that bad, depending on what the scheduler looks like but that would slow the entire tool down considerably if they have to wait many minutes each time after hitting a rate limit, which as you say wouldn’t take long with bigger comment sections
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
A bit of both I imagine.
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.
ReVanced can patch most of the popular apps with your own private (free to use) API key.
Step by step guide if you’re interested
I’m sure Reddit is seeing private key usage sky rocketing on their end since ReVanced released these patches. Whether or not Reddit chooses to do anything about it remains to be seen, but I can’t help but wonder how long it will last.
Nowadays I still stick with Lemmy for general scrolling and only go to Reddit for my niche subreddits that don’t have active equivalents here.
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.
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.
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.
That’s literally how they got that piece of shit off the ground; lots and lots of fake engagement
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
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 figured the highest engagement users would leave because they’d care the most about the api changes but wow, I checked a few subs and they all had harsh engagement drops just like askreddit.
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