Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.
Because the most active contributing users left. I used to comment a lot on reddit, but I've been exclusively on Lemmy since my 3rd party app was axed.
And I've been very active here. Like, even on this alt account that I made 16 days ago, my app says my post "karma" is already higher than my reddit comment karma was from over a decade.
I feel more willing to contribute because there's a sense of community, and I'm not just providing free entertainment for a company to profit off of.
I was on reddit for 11 or 12 years. Commented several times a day. Voted 100 times or more per day. Left mid June and haven't been back once. Now I do that shit here instead.
I wanted to call bullshit but they’re entirely right.* Comments per day took a nosedive. Now if only more hobby communities would lift off, I’d be able to abandon Reddit entirely. I’m up to my tits in Linux and privacy guides but I still know nothing of mushroom picking. Nothing!
Edit: *some users pointed out that subredditstats is no longer capable of accurately tracking comment numbers. I was wrong.
You lose those, you're fucked. A full fckin 80-90% of any given user base are consumers / commenters and they follow content. Creators are a keystone species.
The completely unblockable hegetsus ads were really what made me switch to Apollo from the official Reddit app. Then killing third party apps made me leave for good. Bravo, Reddit
A large chunk of the core 1% contributor base dropped Reddit.
I was behind migrating few of the biggest heavyweights, like datahoarder, piracy and so on.
I also helped cause critical damage to Reddit by being the first official subreddit, privatelife, to have migrated to Lemmy many years ago, and to have voiced against spez and reddit's CIA political agendas in plenty capacity.
also have been probably the only subreddit to have closed it on Reddit and made Lemmy the only official place for it.
I have also been one of the few core Lemmy builders during the past 3 years, doing almost everything other than software development.
My privacy community on Reddit had a staggering 12K users with an activity of 100-150 active users all the time. I sacrificed it, and about 1.3K of those moved to Lemmy. It was the only authentic privacy community on reddit, with none to replace it. r/privacy and r/privacyguides are full of bullshitters, donation stealers and harassers.
I for the first time saw a reddit alternative that was not run by right wing nutjobs or was not infested with rightwingers/freezepeachers/nazis/pedos, and had potential to make it the true reddit alternative close to what I imagined. Thanks to OG fellow comrades (you all know who you are), and thanks to the one who told me to go help Lemmy (you da goat), Lemmy is kind of what I wanted it to be. It has a good foundation.
Shortcoming of content other than memes and political bickering needs to be fixed. And people need to stop being consoomers and playing musical chairs with this problem. Try to put in some effort instead of making Lemmy yet another toilet scrolling app.
If you open Reddit without an account on a browser, it will automatically create a username for you when you are on site now. Hopped on to look at a post on a semi active subreddit and saw I was somehow logged in, but it was an auto generated account name. Wonder if they are trying to boost numbers that way as well
Looking at the subreddit stats data it honestly looks more like automation died when the APIs were killed. You can see just a clean drop of 75% on July 11th. I don't think that was all of the content creators suddenly dropping it on the same day. There were so many reposts and botnets that were reposting comments from imgur and old reddit posts and whatever on the big subs that I totally believe the organic traffic on reddit is sub 50%.
That being said I believe that the big hole that automated content filled (resurfacing vast amounts of the most engaging content) will really hurt engagement of humans and the humans will lose interest over time.
I would probably still post on reddit if I could do it from my phone in an app that actually works instead of being a glorified ad platform. They killed 3rd party apps to bully users to switch to the official app to boost the usage stats to have a better angle to haggle for their IPO. Problem is that the official app is just excruciatingly painful to use if you are accustomed to a proper reddit browsing tool.
The backhanded, sneaky way they did it with all the denial and lies was just the straw that broke the camel's back. Instead of being upfront and calling a spade a spade, they commited to a hostile takeover and removed all doubt that reddit is going to stay a platform for the people.
If they would have been honest from the get-go I might have continued posting.
Yeah I went to subredditstats.com and checked out a few of the subreddits with a lot of subscribers. They all show a huge drop both in number of comments and number of posts per day. This is the first time I saw some hard evidence that people have moved away, and it's a lot more than I thought.
I never participated on Reddit, but I used it to check in on tech stuff and other various interests. I didn't spend a lotta time on it, but it was definitely the platform that I spent time on the most.
When all the third-party stuff started happening, I decided to take the principled stand and quit using it, but I was worried it was gonna be difficult.
I was wrong. It was super easy ditching it.
Even though it was the "social" platform I was spending the most time on, it also felt like the easiest to replace—mostly because that content could be found elsewhere. This kinda made me realize that Reddit doesn't have a moat, and it confirmed what I knew all along—the value of the platform is derived from its users. So when there's enough collective will to do something (in this case, fight against network effects), it's incredibly powerful.
Well, they did say that about only the 10% of users were the ones who make comments and engage with the communities, and guess what, that 10% did use more likely than not, the third party apps. I've been a redditor for more than 16 years with a lot of karma, I deleted all my accounts but one, the oldest I had. I've been back for a couple of niche communities but I haven't commented nor upvoted anything.
There's very little engagement to be had from the site anymore. There's a narrow range of acceptable discourse, and anyone going off message is quickly censored.
The news subreddits got hit worst of all. It's pure propaganda , and you can only read so many comments about the great Biden economy and the removed Russian orc before your eyes start to glaze over.
I used to use reddit every day for prob a half hour per day. Now i get on reddit for 2 minutes once a week to copy a podcast announcement to /c/monero@monero.town and thats it. All my reddit usage went to lemmy.
It doesn't help that they are using facebook-like tactics to try and force/coerce you to download and use their app. I recently was trying to find help getting through a difficult part of a game. Reddit seemed to be where most of the good user discussions were at. Reddit's mobile page would give me a pop-up stating that this community was not "trusted" and that I need to view on the app or go to the Reddit front page. There was no option to ignore. Trying to close the pop-up would just send me to the front page. Luckily, I know about old.reddit. That's going to go away eventually though.
Tbh I think the vast majority of people that use these sites are just there to mindlessly scroll. I do imagine a lot of their reactions to the protests was to be pissed at the weird basement dwellers disrupting their porn/aww/etc feeds
More than anything, the fact that Reddit absolutely quadruple-downed on steering people to their garbage app at the same time probably drove a lot of that crowd away. I regard it like Twitter X now: just another rotting, closed-off corporate theme park - and I refuse to believe any content I hit a login wall after getting linked to is important enough to deal with their shit.
I’m not surprised. The user interface for mobile has just gotten awful, and losing third party apps was the last nail in the coffin for me. Within a day I couldn’t stand the official app and went to other sites.
Shame Reddit took such a nosedive. It's a good reminder that no good thing last forever when an IPO is announced and it's time to squeeze every last dollar out
I'd say it goes deeper than that. the lack of a proper mobile app has definitely decreased my presence on reddit. but there's more.
i do visit some 'niche' subreddits about once a day from my desktop (hurrah for old.reddit), and i once went to popular+hot -- it was utter rubbish. being here and on mastodon has opened my eyes on how severely the general content on reddit has deteriorated.
The figure is probably closer to 40% than 90%, subredditstats seems to be affected by the api changes too. However 40% at the low end of the range is still phenomenally bad. And every subreddit is definitely seeing a constantly declining amount of activity now.
I just can't bring myself to use it anymore. It just makes me so sad and disgusted. I used to browse daily. I feel bad for the people still on there seemingly unaware how much they are being taken advantage of and how little the platform cares for them.
It was pretty obvious from looking at /r/all that upvotes and comments are way down. Posts from somewhat obscure subreddits are making it to the front page, something you never saw before. People may be reading, but they're not participating as much as before.
I cut the cord and deleted every account I had, something like 10+ years and haven’t looked back since then. Could I see myself going back? Maybe if there were substantial changes in leadership and if they took some sort of steps to rectify, but neither of those look forthcoming, soooo… here we are.
It will be quite a shame to see Reddit gone (like in the way of Myspace). I really read tons of posts hourly and daily on the site. I am still currently a member on the site.
Hope there will be better places to go if Reddit is gone.