I couldn't find any info but what was the end result of the blackouts?
Did reddit agree or compromise, or did the movement run out of steam? Just curious if anyone knows..
Readit NewsReadit NewsDid reddit agree or compromise, or did the movement run out of steam? Just curious if anyone knows..
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.
It's wrong for all subs I checked. For example: https://subredditstats.com/r/thethickofit
Just 3 comments for Nov 22, 8 for Nov 23. But how does that square with the existence of this thread from Nob 22 with 84 comments? https://old.reddit.com/r/thethickofit/comments/181d68u/ben_s...
And there's a bunch of other threads too! It's not just "a little bit wrong" it's completely wrong. That site seems about on the ball as a dead seal.
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.
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).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425415
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.
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.
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.
Last week I clicked some link leading to reddit, I was surprised I am still logged in.
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.
> 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
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
[0]: https://github.com/mushroomlabs/fediverser
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38007028
[2]: https://portal.alien.top/
[3]: https://fediverser.network
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.
> Etsy seems dominated by stores that sell nothing with a few that do rather well. It's severely Pareto skewed.
This is a relatively rare use of language, so you might deserve co-invention credit.
1. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-did-it-reddit
It shows different stats because the API changed. DAU is likely higher than ever.
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.
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fight the power!
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.
So only down by two thirds, so they still have to double down if they want to outcompete X.
That's not to say that Reddit has a great, glorious future. But by any quantifiable metrics, Reddit "won."
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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.
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.
Please. There are many subs, which lack mods and need to throw bodies at mod queues.
If it helps, I’ve seen Reddit outreach programs to mods, and they used to respect the opinions of certain mods and subs.
Spez recently joined a mod team.
It’s enlightening, one of those “everyone should do this” kind of experiences.
Reddit modding in particular is not just modding, but also community outreach and management, typically for text.
They shut off API access to their data around the very same time. Is that a coincidence?
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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 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.
The average person didn't care about what the mods wanted.
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.
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It’s kind of a relief. I think I was too “lazy” to stop on my own because Apollo was so comfortable to use.
I tried last week ( after a few months off Reddit) to install the Reddit app, and it’s appallingly bad. It’s so confusing that I’m not quite sure what sub I’m reading, what’s user generated, and what’s an ad ( I was never a prolific poster, commenter, mod or anything - just reading is difficult now )
So independently of the politics, I’ve tried to come back to the platform, but I can’t, because the new product is vastly inferior to the old one.
I'm unable to tell apart ads properly either quickly on reddit, and given the it's the same user action to collapse a comment and to click an ad that looks like a comment, I've misclicked on ads many, many times. It doesn't help that they place them at the top of the comments section and seem to be deliberately designed to look like gif comments.
As an advertiser I would not be particularly chuffed. I can say with confidence that my accidental ad click rate on reddit is 100%.
Fixed that for you ;)
Ultimately I think if anything had any impact on Reddit's traffic it would have been the killing of the defacto mobile apps. The lesson any future founders should take is to kill off third party apps sooner rather than later if you ever want to do so, before user growth on those platforms becomes an issue.
By comparison, the official Reddit app feels somewhat slower, even on my relatively new Android 12 phone from 2021, having a very noticeable lag when scrolling through articles and comments. For video and photo posts, there's no way of browsing the comments without clicking on the thumbnail and having it auto-play the videos every time, meaning I need to react fast to pause the video (there is practically no way of stopping this). And it doesn't support Android 7 anymore, meaning the only way to access it from my 2018 phone is via the browser.
It baffles me why Reddit would want to cut support for 3rd party apps when they were a key component in the Reddit ecosystem.
https://github.com/ichitaso/ApolloPatcher/releases/latest
https://github.com/EthanArbuckle/Apollo-CustomApiCredentials
Edit: oh never mind, I've been digging into the links but it looks like it's iOS - only. So that explains why I've never come across it before.
Same and mainly because Kagi let's me rewrite the url to a private libreddit instance. Otherwise I'd have downranked it.
- Narwhal 2: https://narwhal.app/
Of course, you pay the API costs. But this is pro work, countless UX details thoughtfully made.
- Winston: https://winston.cafe/
- Winston on GitHub: https://github.com/lo-cafe/winston
In TestFlight Beta, OK on iPhone but awkward on iPad unless full screen; layout is jumbled mess in stage manager windows.
It's just bizarre to me that they didn't try to buy one of these apps to replace their own. That would've been a net win. It seems instead, as throughout their history, that their leadership is constantly trying to destroy it.
If they had external investors they'd be being hit with shareholder lawsuits constantly.
Nowadays I'm mostly on Tildes and here, neither of which has the endless inflow of content that Reddit did, it's actually possible to read "everything" on both and then go do something else.
As for other websites, Lemmy and other federated aggregators have gained a bit of a foothold.
Post quality also declined after the 2017 redesign. The old design had a sidebar where subreddits kept a FAQ and wiki. Today, the same questions get asked again and again on many subreddits. Mods can't lock those posts and direct the author to the FAQ, because most users can't even see the FAQ. Mods who try to ensure a firm hand regularly get excoriated by the community, even by regulars on the sub, as "gatekeepers".
In one of the craft based subs I moderate (5m subs - reasonably sized one), it's not so much the quality of posts has dropped, it's that the quantity has dropped, and dropped significantly. This seems to directly translate to garbage posts getting a lot more visibility and sticking around for a lot longer. The good quality posts are still there, but proportionally the garbage is much more visible now.
This is enough of a problem that subscribers have been complaining about it. Not much can be done until (and only if) the number of actual contributors begins to rise again.
On the other hand, I also run a tiny local city sub (maybe 20k ppl) - the number of posts has been steadily growing. I can't work that one out.
Local subs growing despite power users vacating kind of lines up with this too — casual users seem more likely to treat Reddit like one of the bigger platforms like Facebook, seeking out subreddits that are more broadly appealing or based around locality rather than interest-based subreddits.
Mine's gone from 1-1.5k to 2-400 posts a day.
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I personally wrote a userscript to wipe every post comment I've ever made, and have limited my usage to a few particular subs that I still lurk (/r/LocalLLaMA in particular) just bc Lemmy still doesn't seem to have a comparable level of activity.
Speaking of which I'm still trying to sort out the situation involving which instances federate with which, and where to actually set up a primary account, and what the interop situation with different Fediverse platforms is even like in general for that matter.
Those that replaced it with Lemmy, and those that took it as a moment to kick a habit.
I think the latter is the larger group.
Yeah, I can see the average quality has been going down. Also I've felt less enthusiastic about contributing. I just won't bother submitting articles, writing a more insightful comment, etc
Lately, they only deserve bottom of the barrel engagement
I truly believe Reddit themselves are using the bots to fake participation.
This was noticeable immediately after the blackout, with all of the “I’m sorry I’m not allowed to generate offensive content” comments .. which I’m sure they only learned to filter away.
https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
Nearly half the active users have disappeared again since the peak.
The official mobile app is also really persistent about pushing content it thinks you might like which has the unintended consequence of generalizing those niche subreddits to the degree that they lose that niche focus. For example, if every /r/movies user gets /r/criterion pushed to them, the content of /r/criterion will slowly transform to match the tastes of the /r/movie users.
Power vacuums filling up always lead to lower quality governance, but it seems that reddit did not have to be governed that well after all.
I entirely quit it myself, and when I do end up driving bythe more niche subreddits from typical search results, I find that it feels way more dead.
Many subreddits have outright collapsed and will almost certainly never return.
But the subreddits that stayed seem to hit the frontpage and attract new followers... All the Redditors looking for new hangout spots. Post quality has declined as a result, but the subs who stayed have seemingly absorbed the traffic.
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Lemmy.world usage spiked dramatically, as has Mastodon.world. I think these alternative open source communities show lots of promise, though many decisions at Lemmy seem naiive right now.
The adults seem aware of the Lemmy problems however so I remain hopeful. If your community is text based, Lemmy is likely a good fit.
Picture based communities have a NSFW / trolling problem that is still an open question. If trolls can post CSAM to threaten the moderators / admins, what are Lemmy admins supposed to do about that?
DeFederation (and temporary DeFederation) are okay tools for this problem... But better tools need to be built into Lemmy. Random server #244 doesn't necessarily deserve to be defederated if just 20 or so trolls are posting CSAM and threatening Admins. Nominally, a tool that more selectively bans users (or new users only) instead of cutting off the whole server would be ideal.
The answer is, obviously, "patches welcome." But this stuff is a bit janky.
The other big problem is that the Fediverse is a collection of software that doesn't quite talk to each other - ActivityPub is a bit underspecified in practice, and you're gonna have to test combinations of actual running code. We've been having a bizarre time just trying to talk to Kbin reliably, i.e. software intended to do the same Reddit-alike job as Lemmy. We almost have two-way Mastodon story and comment flow working, except when the Mastodon has authorized_fetch switched on. Etc etc etc, the problems are a string of little glitches.
OTOH, it basically works well enough to sustain discussion, both local and federated. So everything else is fussing, really.
* https://awful.systems/ official refuge of SneerClub and TechTakes
Yeah.
I'm optimistic on this front. Bugs are one of those things that "everyone agrees upon", although you're right in that the Lemmy development environment hasn't taken off or expanded as much as it probably should have. Still, bugs will be fixed because its low-hanging fruit. Everyone gets bothered, someone will get bothered enough and then a patch will be submitted.
The advancements from 0.17 to 0.18.0 to 0.18.5 have grossly improved Lemmy in substantial ways. There's enough bug-progress that I'm happy. There's plenty more bugs, but progress is largely all that I care about.
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The deeper concern of mine, and I alluded to this earlier with my "Naive" comment, is that Lemmy is very ideological right now. Ex: There was a week or two where people were against Lemmy Search Engines, worried that they'd track us. (Thankfully, someone made search-lemmy.com and life is better now).
But now we're running into a "Privacy / anti-tracking" problem, directly in relation to this new-user / trolling issue. The most direct solution to the trolling problem is to have a way to track new-users and their early posts to see if they're a bot, troll, or otherwise a fake malicious account. Reddit does this through its Karma system.
But Lemmy is fundamentally against Karma-tracking at the moment, meaning an _actual_ solution to this "trolls just create a new account from an unmoderated server" cannot rely upon karma (right now). I'm hoping that the politics shift enough that we can start talking about Karma-tracking (or other simple statistics that grossly diminish trolling behavior), but its going to be a while before everyone gets convinced IMO.
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I think the "Adults in the room" know about the problem. But there's also the need for the underlying community to believe in the problem and have an ideological shift to successfully keep the community in unison.
Or to get more specific: I know the Beehaw.org server wants to join everyone else in the federation. And we all know why they aren't doing so, and everyone respects everyone else's opinions and situation. Until this trolling problem is... addressable (not necessarily solved, but "addressed", so that we have tools to deal with it), it will be best for some instances to just remain de-federated (especially from open-registration servers who are prone to these coordinated trolling-assaults).
Many subreddit moderators protested in various ways and were removed and replaced.
Reddit never agreed or compromised and for the most part the movement seems to have run out of steam.
Maybe if Reddit squeezes more, more users will go to Lemmy and similar alternative platforms?
This is because Google is assigning more weight to user-generated content, since the rise of AI-generated content, and I believe traffic will keep growing.
oh, no worries. We have at least two looming controversies for that upcoming.
1. the contributor program (AKA, get paid to post on reddit) that replaces Reddit Gold that was datamined: https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/25/reddit-will-start-paying-y...
2. the looming hostility towards NSFW content that will likely in the mid term (1-2 years) lead to reddit trying to cut off NSFW material.
It's a matter of being prepared for the next drama instead of if it'll ever happen again.
Personally I have essentially not used reddit since June outside of following links there from searches. It was the thing that got me to make an HN account after being a passive reader for like 7 years.
[1] https://tr3y.io/articles/tech/reddit.html
It's an entirely different medium that serves an entirely different purpose. Reddit is a message board. Discord is chat. A highly-active Discord is impossible to keep up with, whereas a highly active subreddit is still very useable. You can post a question on reddit, go to work, come home many hours later, and read the answers, and it's easy no matter how much traffic the sub gets. On Discord, if it's very active, you could find yourself scouring through hundreds of messages to see if someone replied to you and didn't use the Reply feature.
Look at HN - simple hierarchical discussion forums with a negligible barrier to entry and no grating artificial limitations, and we quite rightly love it.
In short, I still use Reddit, but there's nothing ideological about that choice.
Without an alternative to reddit, using the reddit app remains the way to stay informed & engaged in various niche reddit communities.
I still use reddit the same today as I have been for the last 10+ years (chrome + RES). /r/all is as bad as it's ever been, however my subbed feed hasn't changed much.
HN is a highly skewed techy community. And I imagine many are reddit vagrants as well. I see it less as "giving the right answer" and more "asking a biased audience". It's the opposite of asking people on reddit what they think of the blackout; many who stayed and never used 3rd party apps probably didn't care or even argue it was an abuse of mod power.
And of course, Reddit isn't just one website. Some places may have barely changed. Others are indeed irreparably changed. Others still are literally shut down. The question is highly sensitive to how you browse, and what you browse.
- tech topics I browse on HN for. 90+% of what I'd see on places like r/technology I'd see here with tons of discussion
- more political or otherwise touchy topics I replaced with tildes.net. And honestly I am the much better off for it. It is a lot quieter than Reddit, but there are very few times where I feel such topics devolve into the polarized turf wars you know r/politics to be.
- Don't browse it as much, but for memes/humor stuff Lemmy and KBin work well enough. still very much growing and I hope they can become more general purpose replacements, but for now non-meme stuff is a trickle unless it's that 1-2 posts that blow up (usually political stuff or more reddit drama... not what I go there for)
- lastly, a lot of gaming stuff I migrated to discord for. Definitely the worst experience when on large servers and it feels even noisier than Twitter. But the small community for niche genres or specific games are surprisingly cozy. It's a real mixed bag.
So I'd say it's 90% replaced. But I can also admit there are some few communities I reluctantly go back to that keep me from fully disconnecting to reddit (though, note that I deleted my account way back in February. I fully lurk):
- gamedev communities are a huge one. The best alternative to that is Twitter and... no, I still can't do Twitter/X/Whatever Musk fancies that day of the week. Never liked it before, and I'd rather deal with Reddit's madness than try to learn it in 2023 at its worst. maybe I'll try Bluesky one day, but I'm personally rooting for Mastodon (haven't checked it out myself, though).
- in a similar vein, I still find it easier to skim for industry news on r/games and related subs than to scour the net. This is definitely laziness on my end so I can't pretend to be immune from the path of least resistance. I can alleviate half of this with a proper RSS feed (never used one, but I am very curious about setting one up), but research into this really made me remember how many sites I used to discuss on removed their forums or comment sections. Or in some cases, the comments make reddit look like a bastion of nuance in comparison.
well, one day. I'm still searching in the meantime.
I personally tried to build an alternative back then [1] (open source [2]), but the problem even Reddit is facing now is acquiring more users and keeping high quality content.
Last time I checked Lemmy, it wasn't doing good either - but these might just be personal Interpretations of the current situation.
[1]: https://rings.social/
[2]: https://github.com/rings-social