[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?
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..
Author : thyrox
Score : 131 points
Date : 2023-11-26 17:12 UTC (5 hours ago)
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| Some Reddit communities fled to other platforms such as Lemmy:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network)
|
| 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?
| x86x87 wrote:
| Nah. A lot of power users are gone. Now it will slowly slide
| into irrelevance.
| jseliger wrote:
| We'll see. Back in 2015 I wrote about how poor moderation and
| moderator incentives were problems, and yet since then Reddit
| has kept growing: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/03/16/the-
| moderator-problem-how....
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| You can be both large and irrelevant. Facebook is perhaps
| the best example of this. Reddit feels headed in the same
| direction.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Define irrelevant, because if it has eyeballs...
| david927 wrote:
| If early adopters have moved elsewhere, and it's all
| late-majority, it will have the most eyeballs right
| before it dies out.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Facebook has the eyeballs. I don't think it's relevant
| anymore
| powera wrote:
| Many of the "power users" were outright liabilities for
| Reddit, and they should consider their departure a good
| thing.
| x86x87 wrote:
| It depends. When your best content and the filtering of
| crap content comes from these power users you're in trouble
| when they leave.
| realusername wrote:
| I disagree, they had a lot power users creating the content
| and now it definitely dropped in quality.
| punkspider wrote:
| Reddit's Google traffic is growing at this time. The only
| time it was higher was in March 2022, according to SEMrush.
|
| 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.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Had as much impact as a fart in a hurricane.
|
| May a bit more: there were a few news stories about it, so it
| wasn't totally silent; but I kinda doubt the people it was meant
| to impact were at all distressed.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| I disagree, it was impactful. More than a fart. What we have to
| look at is the impact though, not some specific objective that
| was impossible anyway (ie killing Reddit).
|
| The impact was massive attention to alternatives. Tons of
| traffic testing on said alternatives. Tons of press to activity
| pub, etc etc.
|
| It's just like Mastodon. Every exodus was big for mastodon and
| activity pub. It gained traffic, interest, devs and users. Did
| it kill twitter? Of course not, but only fools thought it was
| likely to.
|
| Killing some massive social network is near impossible. But
| dismissing the twitter or Reddit drama as being irrelevant
| because they didn't die is missing a lot of interesting
| development in the FOSS ecosystem imo.
| seesaw wrote:
| Personally, I used to spend over an hour a day on Reddit. Now
| it has reduced to 10 minutes a week. Even when I go there, I
| see less quality posts at the top than before. So I think the
| blackout definitely had an impact, and Reddit is slowly going
| to become irrelevant.
| rchaud wrote:
| If it had such a minimal impact, downloads of the official app
| should be exploding. Haven't heard anything suggesting that to
| be the case.
| rafram wrote:
| It's now the #1 most downloaded app in the news category on
| the App Store, ahead of Twitter and Nextdoor. So maybe
| downloads did explode?
| crazygringo wrote:
| It seems like that data should be accessible at:
|
| https://www.similarweb.com/app/google-
| play/com.reddit.frontp...
|
| https://www.similarweb.com/app/app-
| store/1064216828/statisti...
|
| But you need a paid account to access stats older than 28
| days, and this needs the 6-month view (or even longer,
| ideally).
|
| Anyone here subscribe to Similarweb, and can answer for us?
| Or know of freely available historical app ranking stats?
| rchaud wrote:
| I'll just wait for the S-1 investor disclosures they put
| out prior to their IPO.
| loxias wrote:
| Strongly disagree, it was very impactful to me. A few
| communities I really liked and used for support up and left to
| other platforms, leading to other issues. I tried to follow
| some of them but it didn't work. My take away of the blackout
| is "reddit broke, lots of the good people left, life is more
| lonely as a result".
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| Lots of bad people left too, which is probably a net good for
| reddit even if the number is lopsided for one or the other.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| The subreddits I used to visit are in a zombie state. It was
| like they killed 20% of my internet experience. More time spent
| here I suppose is better time, but Reddit was a good general
| purpose community until then. I guess the younger users fled to
| tiktok and the others to facebook?
| CM30 wrote:
| Depends on the community. Some subreddits I used to go to
| migrated off the platform or closed down entirely, but many
| others just reopened with new staff and proceeded as usual. Not
| sure if activity was affected sitewide, though it feels a bit
| more quiet than it used to for me.
| TerrifiedMouse wrote:
| > feels a bit more quiet than it used to for me.
|
| The site as a whole feels a bit less active - i.e. not as
| active as it used to be.
| paradox460 wrote:
| And what activity there is, is tepid and bland, the same low
| effort crap you'd see on Facebook or YouTube comments
|
| The soul is dead, the body is alive
| rchaud wrote:
| I've seen this happening for the city/state subreddits.
| Maybe the regulars stopped posting, because now it just
| reads like a Facebook group, constant fear mongering.
| slashtab wrote:
| iirc there was a report in the Verge that overall content
| quality has fallen. r/all has mostly short trending tiktok
| video, earlier it used to be niche interesting topic, you
| wouldn't find anywhere else.
|
| I started using tildes.net which is invite only interesting
| community.
|
| https://tildes.net/register?code=QF8KC-GAWKJ-K6WQ6
|
| https://tildes.net/register?code=F67V6-483W1-ADFS0
| rchaud wrote:
| r/all was formulaic upvote-bait for a couple of years before
| recent events. It was only readable with a robust subreddit
| blocklist.
| sorahn wrote:
| My outcome was the shutdown of Apollo, rather than the blackout.
| I no longer read Reddit on my phone. (Except for a link or two
| clicked from something else, but even then I go to `old.reddit`
| instead to read the comments). That was really where I wasted the
| most time on it.
|
| It's kind of a relief. I think I was too "lazy" to stop on my own
| because Apollo was so comfortable to use.
| funkychicken wrote:
| +1. I'm grateful because I knew it was in my mental health's
| best interest to stop endlessly scrolling /r/all, but I needed
| a push.
| cxx wrote:
| Apollo's shutdown was a blessing in disguise, I was addicted to
| Reddit and wasted hours on it before going to sleep. Thanks to
| that event I no longer browse or even feel the need to see
| what's going on, it's like quitting smoking, I literally feel
| better and relieved that I quit. I don't think I would've been
| able to stop on my own either, Apollo made it too easy.
| nishantk wrote:
| Exactly this.
| realusername wrote:
| Same outcome for me but with Relay for Reddit, I could not
| bring myself to use the official app and now my usage dropped
| closed to zero which was a good thing, I have more time for
| productive stuff.
| replwoacause wrote:
| Same thing here. I stopped browsing Reddit mindlessly and only
| end up there now if a Kagi search takes me there. Otherwise I
| am almost completely off the platform, which is saying a lot
| because I used to spend 1-2 hours a day there.
| willis936 wrote:
| Same here. I'm happily spending more free time on creative and
| learning ventures.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Yep I was using Baconreader and when that stopped working, I
| simply stopped using reddit. I was not a heavy user by that
| point, but now my use has gone to zero aside from the
| occasional google search result leading me there.
| nkotov wrote:
| I've been using Winston as an alternative but it still doesn't
| compared to how good Apollo was. My reddit usage overall has
| decreased simply because of it.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Yep, Apollo going away made me stop using mobile Reddit
| completely. Don't bother on the desktop either, because I liked
| the Apollo UI a lot more.
|
| 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.
| elmepo wrote:
| Same, albeit with Reddit is Fun. Personally I used to visit
| Reddit multiple times per day but now I typically visit it once
| or twice per week, if at all. I'm sure the official app is
| fine, but the approach they took to third party developers
| soured it for me.
|
| 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.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| Agreed it means I no longer read Reddit at all because Apollo's
| gone.
|
| 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.
| nullc wrote:
| Lots of communities died: they "moved" to other platforms but
| didn't meaningfully survive the move. Reddit's conduct didn't
| change.
| fsmv wrote:
| Personally I moved to lemmy and hackernews and stopped using
| reddit because the apps stopped working.
| bergie wrote:
| I generally don't use apps for things that have a decent
| website. Reddit was still in that category.
|
| But after they started doing stupid stuff I also moved to
| Lemmy, and haven't looked back.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| Reddit feels pretty dead nowadays in comparison. Or at least it
| is mostly dead to me.
| okdood64 wrote:
| What subreddits did you frequent that now feel dead?
| 7373737373 wrote:
| Many of those I frequented are now privated, many have been
| banned for having no moderators, discussion quality has
| become abysmal (i'm very glad that HN has collectively
| managed to resist reddit-style "humor" comment chains so
| far), the frontpage/default subreddits are full of politics,
| bots, karma farmers, sob stories and ragebait.
| x86x87 wrote:
| I stopped using Reddit. That was the impact to me.
| paulcole wrote:
| No change for me. I had to stop using Apollo (and Narwhal sucks)
| but using the browser is fine with me.
|
| I signed up for the $60/yr. Ad-free version and Reddits still
| great IMO.
| tgv wrote:
| I'd say the net change is -$60.
| rchaud wrote:
| All the 3rd party client apps are dead, but the RES extension
| still works for now.
|
| In terms of outcomes, Reddit appears to have made their mobile
| website less user-hostile. Dismissing the "download app" modal
| still has to be done, but after that the experience is OK.
| Funnily enough, there are not that many ads on the official site,
| because Reddit seemingly doesn't have many advertisers to begin
| with.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I used to use Reddit Sync. I uninstalled it when the API change
| happened. I don't miss it. But a while later I wondered if
| anything was still discussed on the subreddit and it seemed
| that people had found a workaround and were continuing to use
| the app. Not sure if it's still possible or possible with other
| apps.
| Tenemo wrote:
| Not completely dead, but yeah, for the vast majority of users
| who are not very technical, they are dead (and unsupported). I,
| personally, still use Reddit is Fun daily, so the API price
| hike didn't change anything for me, so far. It just required a
| patch with ReVanced Manager and providing your own API key via
| a text file.
| fdgjgbdfhgb wrote:
| Anecdotally, I mostly stopped using it, except for sport news and
| live threads.
|
| The subreddit I moderate (100k subs) saw no lasting impact on
| traffic. We participated in the blackout for 2 or 3 days and then
| carried on as normal.
|
| To be fair, it is a sub for a TV show, so the traffic is very
| seasonal. The blackout happened in the off-season, and now that
| the show is back we have a lot of traffic again.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| nothing changed for me
|
| we berated everyone that tried to bring that drama into our
| subreddits, it's literally just a forum
|
| the mods acknowledged that they have worse tools and that's still
| true
| nunez wrote:
| my guess: mission accomplished from reddit's perspective. they
| lost more than they did during the ellen pao blackout but gained
| enough users to make up the difference, have more paid
| subscribers than they did previously and are probably saving a
| ton of money from all of the API traffic from the 3p clients that
| were kicked out.
|
| lemmy is more popular than voat.co (shut down in 2020) but still
| far from a reddit alternative.
|
| (I deleted my 12-year-old account and all of the posts/comments I
| made with it, and I use the site much less than I used to.)
| apwell23 wrote:
| >ellen pao blackout
|
| those were some innocent times
| Projectiboga wrote:
| It pushed me over to here more. I used to lurk on both HN, Reddit
| and some tech sites on a web 2.0 aggregator ( www.jimmyr.com )
| ever since Digg was still going strong. I used to follow
| r/science, r/ech, r/pics or r/images (basically imgur top list)
| and the front page, all in separate dozen item lists, each in a
| separate tabbed section. Front had digg on onther tab, science w
| newscientist etc. The front page on there which lagged the main
| front page slightly as it was from some cache had slowly been
| eroding over the years but now what I see there is a ghost of its
| self. I'll wander over to R/usenet now to check the holiday deals
| and see what that forum looks like now.
| rabbits_2002 wrote:
| A massive decline in post quality. I don't know what happened but
| ever since the blackout only garbage gets posted. Even the
| quality of niche subreddits has fallen. I think the blackout
| meant that all the well moderated "good" subreddits closed while
| the bad ones stayed open. Now the bad subreddits are more popular
| and have eclipsed the good subreddits.
|
| As for other websites, Lemmy and other federated aggregators have
| gained a bit of a foothold.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Less good moderators + more GPT generated comments
|
| 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
| davesmylie wrote:
| I don't know about "only garbage gets posted".
|
| 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.
| veqq wrote:
| > the quantity has dropped, and dropped significantly
|
| Mine's gone from 1-1.5k to 2-400 posts a day.
| davesmylie wrote:
| I suspect over time the numbers will grow back to where
| they were.... but it's gonna be a completely different
| crowd that what made it great originally.
|
| reddit wants to jump on to the low-effort click-drawing
| content bandwagon - whilst good for their numbers in short
| term I think low term it's not going to be great. I know
| for my sub, the discord community has now taken off and is
| probably more vibrant than the sub currently is.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| As I see it, post quality declined massively starting from when
| the smartphone became the device most users were browsing from.
| No matter how proficient people claim to be with a phone
| keyboard, it is a medium that discourages longform text. The
| blackout made no difference with regard to that, the damage was
| already done.
|
| 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".
| chaosharmonic wrote:
| Yeah, several of the more technical subs that I used to
| frequent either just never reopened or splintered off to Lemmy.
| Some (like /r/Android) actually have entire instances.
|
| 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.
| qznc wrote:
| Lemmy certainly got a boost but I'm not sure yet that is
| stable.
|
| https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
|
| Nearly half the active users have disappeared again since the
| peak.
| jmd42 wrote:
| Reddit did make some concessions about continuing to support free
| API access for accessibility-related tools, which was one of the
| major complaints about the pricing announcement:
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/7/23752804/reddit-exempt-acc...
| hamandcheese wrote:
| I never was a huge Reddit user before, but I have noticed an
| increase in lower-quality reddit-style comments here on HN in the
| last year or so. Thankfully they usually get downvoted or are
| already dead. I might have to turn off showdead though.
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| I've noticed the same. Usually it takes the form of dumb
| phrase-like jokes, retorts, puns, etc, with the entire chain
| being downvoted and flagged. This is necessary to keep HN from
| devolving into thoughtless meme-style posts that just clutter
| the space.
| COGlory wrote:
| Glad it's not just me. I've seen many people complain about
| the reduced quality of discord on HN for years and years, and
| never noticed it myself. Last few months I keep running into
| very low effort comments, to the point that this notion has
| really started to become impossible to ignore.
| pugworthy wrote:
| I get the notion of not allowing it to devolve, however I do
| think it should be OK and acceptable to upvote someone for
| truly making a humorous or clever comment. I work with a lot
| of clever people in my job, and humor (even bad humor) is
| part of our daily camaraderie and social interaction, so in
| some ways it's second nature for me to want to post humorous
| comments.
|
| Not to over complicate the comment system here but I wish one
| could just tag a comment as "humor" and one could then choose
| to just not show them if one did not care to see such things.
| okdood64 wrote:
| Slippery slope. Personally I'm okay with no pure, low
| effort humor posts on here. Besides, one person's joke is
| another person's eye roll.
| csharpminor wrote:
| Yes, the "Rockwell Retro Encabulator" - a Reddit favorite - is
| currently on the front page of HN. Sigh.
| e2le wrote:
| The quality of comments on Reddit has also declined.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Nothing, some of us already knew nothing would come of it. People
| are just so dramatic and they don't understand the services
| they're using.
|
| Most people have no idea what's behind reddit, facebook, youtube.
| They just see a free shiny thing and start using it. Then one day
| the free shiny thing has a gross ad on it, and one day it has
| another one, and before they know it, it's unusable.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| caslon wrote:
| > 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.
| buildbot wrote:
| 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.
| ben_w wrote:
| > trashy/Facebook
|
| 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.
| buildbot wrote:
| 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.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| 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.
| Macha wrote:
| Another data point:
|
| r/anime does a weekly ranking of show discussion threads
| based on activity.
|
| Fall 2022, week 2: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3
| A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fu...
|
| Fall 2023, week 3: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3
| A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F9...
|
| 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.
| dubeye wrote:
| The attempt to change policy completely failed. Wasn't a
| stalemate in any sense of the word
| ben_w wrote:
| Pyrrhic victory for Reddit Corporation?
| nerdponx wrote:
| 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.
| Arson9416 wrote:
| We did it reddit![1]
|
| 1. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-did-it-reddit
| Uptrenda wrote:
| reddit mods learn they have no power in the real world, speed
| run.
| 4death4 wrote:
| That's really interesting data. But isn't it possible less
| popular subreddits have picked up the slack?
| _kulang wrote:
| 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
| jiggawatts wrote:
| /r/all has turned into a cesspit that makes 4chan look like
| the Library of Alexandria in comparison.
| Pathogen-David wrote:
| 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.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| What did you switch to?
| lupusreal wrote:
| 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.
|
| 7 years clean, I'm never going back.
| circuit10 wrote:
| I'm not the person you asked but I ended up replacing it
| with this site...
| Pathogen-David wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]: https://www.askamanager.org/
| latexr wrote:
| 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.
| johndunne wrote:
| 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."
| Pathogen-David wrote:
| 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.)
| allarm wrote:
| I switched from social media overall to reading books.
| nerdponx wrote:
| 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.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| 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.
| sixothree wrote:
| For me it is YouTube 100%. I really just used Reddit as a
| way to kill time. Now I just watch makers doing their
| thing.
| pipes wrote:
| 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.
| riidom wrote:
| 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.
| sixothree wrote:
| Wouldn't call myself addicted but it was my go-to when I
| wanted to kill a little time. I uninstalled all the apps and
| pretty much never visit.
| n2d4 wrote:
| 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.
| josefx wrote:
| > they have 700 comments which is more than the peak that
| Subreddit Stats says they had since July.
|
| So only down by two thirds, so they still have to double down
| if they want to outcompete X.
| n2d4 wrote:
| 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).
| namrog84 wrote:
| 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.
| Racing0461 wrote:
| Is the data correct tho? Since its mos tlikely using the same
| api that was cencelled causing th eblackouts.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| 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).
| Racing0461 wrote:
| makes sense. if it was consistently inaccurate, the drop in
| traffic relative to the moving average would be captured.
| praisewhitey wrote:
| add this to the list https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/
| soulofmischief wrote:
| At the top of the page:
|
| > 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
| dicriseg wrote:
| 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!
| screye wrote:
| The exodus was worse than the numbers indicate.
|
| 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.
| Uptrenda wrote:
| 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.
| arp242 wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| swores wrote:
| 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.
| nurettin wrote:
| End result was: mastodon networks got a huge amount of bored
| redditors.
| mhb wrote:
| We'll know in nine months.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Personal anecdotal experience here.
|
| 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.
|
| ------
|
| 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.
| w-m wrote:
| Another data point, the top AskReddit posts of the past year [0].
|
| Zero of the top 25 posts of the last twelve months are younger
| than five months. Two of the top 50 posts are younger than five
| months.
|
| Comments (using subredditstats from a sister comment) have gone
| from around 70k per day to around 12k per day.
|
| [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/top/?sort=top&t=year
| constantly wrote:
| I still use it daily. It seems the same to me as it was. Maybe
| some subreddits no longer exist, but as I predicted they were
| just replaced with other similar subreddits to fill the gap. But
| realistically they were totally fungible anyways, so it's not as
| if I care that I'm seeing videos on "r/video" or r/videos" or
| something else. I don't notice any increase in spam, which was a
| big "you better agree to to our demands or else" point.
|
| Anecdotally scanning the main comments in the all subreddits, I
| don't see any change in number of comments anyways. Honestly
| without quantitative data on comment quality or comment numbers,
| I'd be skeptical of bias by anyone willing their pet desired
| outcome from api changes into existence.
| jjcm wrote:
| For me at least, it gave me the motivation to launch. I had been
| working on a Reddit-like platform for several years, and didn't
| really have pressure to launch. There was always "one more thing"
| to build. I was pretty stunned with the positive response to it
| on HN[0]. With Apollo going down as well, I've since been
| creating an iOS app for the site fairly heavily inspired by
| it[1], and hired a dev as well.
|
| Traffic has since died down heavily (I'm down to 40 subscribers
| from a peak of 120 during the HN launch), but it still motivates
| me knowing there's at least a desire for something similar (and
| hopefully better).
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296695
|
| [1] https://non.io/Nonio-ios-app-designs-November-update
| 58x14 wrote:
| I spent half my day following your launch, and it looked like
| things were going downhill pretty quickly. How have things been
| since? You turned on your paid subscription signup?
| rozab wrote:
| Some subreddits such as r/malefashionadvice did achieve the
| critical mass required to fully migrate to another platform.
|
| In that case, the moderators never re-opened and were replaced by
| scabs by the admins. But the sub remained fully dead. The
| userbase had moved to a discord server, which is well run and has
| plenty of users in the 50+ age bracket not normally associated
| with the platform.
| denysvitali wrote:
| I think people silently left, and now Reddit usage declined. I
| don't have the data to prove it - but from the quality of the
| content nowadays (for the little I have checked it out) is really
| bad.
|
| 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
| Loughla wrote:
| I left the platform completely. So that's at least n=1?
| machdiamonds wrote:
| There are still some good subreddits, like "LocalLLama", but most
| of them seem to have been ruined by mods. I think this was the
| case even before the whole API issue, which just accelerated the
| decline.
| thorum wrote:
| I believe the primary outcome was users switching from the
| popular Apollo app, which closed down, to Narwhal which stayed
| active, added a paid plan, and rolled out a redesign to integrate
| many features from Apollo.
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