Is there any evidence that Reddit has suffered at all from the exodus to Lemmy?
Is there any evidence that Reddit has suffered at all from the exodus to Lemmy?
Was there even a mass exodus? I largely avoid Reddit now, but I do kind of doubt that they've been hurt in any meaningful way by all the protests and people leaving...
If we're perfectly honest - No.
Reddit has over 53 some odd million users. Million with an M. Lemmy has gained, at most, upwards of just thousands. To call it a 'mass exodus' is really overselling it.
It's going to take a fairly long time, for Lemmy to even scratch 100k even. I'm on both Reddit and Lemmy. Lemmy, for a more positive experience. Reddit, because the numbers are just there.
Several major subs have closed, they're forced to campaign to keep mods, a significant amount of content generators have left. Even though it's been only a couple weeks, they've slid on the global index of visited sites. They've lost 3-4% of 1.7 billion views in weeks. That's 10's of millions of ads not delivered. That alone is several million dollars lost on a site trying to be profitable. This doesn't include people on the fence, people currently unaffected because their app didn't die until this week, or people just watching the drama until it's boring again. Also, Reddit depends heavily on free labor to succeed, the bulk of the community that is leaving is their free labor pool. They don't have the cash to pay moderators for their time and they just removed the tools that let those people do their work.
This is some fomo type shit.... forget about your ex, invest in your current!!!
Their user numbers are available with a web search. Reddit useage dipped towards end of June but has mostly leveled out.
Quite a few mods left, which has had a larger impact than an equal number of general users leaving would. The niche topic sub I was involved in went from four mods to one half-hearted mod. The quality of posts has dropped. Almost every comment thread contains complaints. Reports are piled up.
Most surprising to me when I peeked at the sub this weekend was the amount of borderline-incel desperation and negativity. The sub is for a hobby that while slightly male majority, we had plenty of women contributing with minimal problems. Not anymore. If I were a woman looking at that sub for the first time, I would probably block it. It is so depressing and angry now, I barely recognize it.
Only evidence I have is:
any day of week 1 of using Lemmy I had about 1 page of new stories on my subscribed communities any day of week 2 of using Lemmy I had about 2 pages of new stories on my communities any day of week 3 (this week) I'm at least 4 pages in and still haven't hit on the old storiesI'm just happy to be here. I care less and less about reddit. Using lemmy and mastodon for a while, it's gotten more and more important to me to just build a great, fun, healthy community and less important (emotionally) to bring down the giants. I still care about it politically and theoretically, I just don't feel it as much.
I feel all those posts about reddit looking for mods for various communities is a good indicator. They might not have lost quantity all that much, but a very small portion of quality kept a lot of reddit interesting and running smoothly. A lot of that has either just dropped entirely engaging or migrated.
I doubt everyone would move. Some people simply take it as a sign to move on and do other things with their limited time on this little planet.
I think the damage done to Reddit is not from protests but the bad management decisions -- enshittification as Corey Doctorow put it -- in order to hasten Reddit's IPO. The attitude by upper management, taking user content for granted, is going to continue to serve to chase users away, or drive them to deprioritize engagement with Reddit.
I'm missing only a couple of communities here on Lemmy but otherwise it serves me as a daily feed. And reddit still can be searched for troubleshooting.
I really don't care about reddit anymore. I pretty happy with Lemmy right now.
I checked out Lemmy many years ago. I didn't sign up because there was one post every few days, and each post got a few single upvotes.
Now there are lots of posts a day, and posts on the front page get hundreds and thousands of votes and comments. I don't think we killed reddit, but there was definitely an exodus.
Reddit front page, not logged in:
The effect is going to be long term. The most active users (usually 10% posters, 1% content creators and mods) were the most affected by the changes. Those are also the most vocal. And, probably the first ones to move here. Once those move reddit content will get worse over time which will make the other users move (89%) too. So yea, don't expect short term impact. It's the long run that matters
I hope so, but I don't care. The same with the bird site. I chose to delete my barely-used bird account when that idiot bought it, and to explore mastadon and lemmy when I could no longer use Apollo to view reddit. Two or 3 times I've popped over to reddit to see what's going on, and check on any other subreddits that have moved to lemmy, and using the official reddit browser or app just reinforces why I left. It's shit, and getting shittier.
Basically I like the mantra "not my circus, not my monkeys."
I suspect their July user metrics will see a hit, but even if all Lemmy activity came directly out of Reddits numbers they would still be a top 10 website in the US by traffic.
You can't have "the downfall of reddit" as a goal, you can only hope for the proliferation of a better experience, hopefully here. Lemmy not dying is preferred over reddit dying.
I don't know if I'd call it a mass exodus, and I don't know that it directly has anything to do with Lemmy, but there's been a noticeable dip in quality. Fewer posts across many of the front page subreddits, fewer votes, more bot posts, more low effort posts, less discussion in comment sections, lots of deleted comments and accounts... overall there just seems to be a dip in quality.
I was going to delete, but decided to stick around for a while first, to see how things pan out, and I've got to say the mobile site is even worse than expected. I get constant pop ups trying to direct me to download the app, then when I say no the website will auto reload, often sending me back to the top of the page. It's difficult to find and respond to anyone who replies to your comments, and sometimes if you sort by top: today it won't even show any posts. Just... blank. Clicking on a post opens it as a tab that is more like a popup, and closing it resets where you were on the page.
I could keep going but I think that pretty much summarizes what I've noticed. Don't know that it's directly related to a Lemmy "exodus," and I'm still finding my way around here so I can't really say, but reddit as we knew it seems pretty dead.
A mass exodus doesn't really happen in the traditional sense unless shit really hits the fan. For that to happen a large majority or even everyone has to be displaced at once and there can be no way to salvage the situation. In this case, there were a lot of short term ways out here for users not directly affected.
But, the whole situation is more akin to a war of attrition. The ones not convinced by the big things, will be convinced by the smaller things that accumulate over time. Goodwill for reddit is at an all time low, which hampers their ability to grow since word of mouth is effectively dead. People that provided effective labour for reddit in the form of moderation or content aggregation lost their morale to continue. Not all of them for sure, but it might very well be a critical mass (even if they didn't move to lemmy).
It's like a line of dominos increasing in size, if the ones that fell now were big enough to topple the next, eventually there will be a ripple effect. Eventually the quality of content goes down, the discourse turns stale and antagonistic, and communities fall apart. Only once the users who took the easy way out now realize that will they finally start the process of moving. And if reddit was doing so bad they had to make this move, I can only assume their future will be very grim indeed. The seed of destruction has been planted. (And if you want an example of that future, look at Twitter)
Whether or not that all actually happens, I'm not sure. I'd like to believe it will, but some people revel in their unreasonableness, and they're often the easiest to exploit for financial gain. I think the best thing is to stop looking back, and focus on what we have here and now. I think what lemmy has achieved so far is already more valuable than reddit had.
This didn't happen quickly with Digg either. This won't be as substantially decimating to the platform as the Digg exodus was, because reddit is WAY bigger than Digg was.
I'd say it took me about 3-4 years to fully migrate away from Digg to reddit, and that process was very similar to today, where there were a ton of platforms gaining steam (even while it was pretty clear that reddit was where the party went).
I think reddit's quality of content will deteriorate over time, and the moderation will suffer. It is going to die a death of 1000 paper cuts. The API change was just reddit saying "Hey, come stab us with your paper knives!"
idk. Reddit in 15 years will probably look a lot like newspapers do today. Kind of a joke, but somehow still standing.
We came to Lemmy for our own benefit, not just to fuck with reddit. Who cares if it hurt them or not? We're better off without reddit, and that is all that matters.
No, of course not. If you're using Lemmy as a "protest" instead of thinking that it's a better platform, it's totally ineffectual and you'll go back to using Reddit sooner or later. Personally, I think that the fediverse is a more compelling idea than the traditional internet, so I'm sticking with Lemmy for a bit in one form or another.
Have they suffered at all? I think the answer is fairly obvious. You’re here, right? Would you be here if they hadn’t fucked around? I wouldn’t be here.
Im working on a case study for a publishing firm about the whole API announcement and subsequent fallout so I've been watching all this really closely. The thing I'm most anxious for is the data on web traffic to reddit and it's competitors, which I can only get on a monthly basis. It dropped a lot from May to June, which you could attribute to the protest or even the summer. However, Discords traffic increased during that time, and it was the only major social platform to change in either direction. I'm hoping to get some clarity once July data comes out but I don't think we well know for sure about long term impact for a while. Reddit I'm sure knows more but definitely won't share it publicly unless necessary, like if they do go public, but I'm not sure that kind of data would be included in a filing.
(I tracked traffic on similarweb and Semrush. Lemmy is on there too, but is tracked per server, and most were tracked starting in may or June so data is pretty limited and can't really be compared.)
The subreddits I watched seem to be as busy as they always were, and the corresponding communities on Lemmy are mostly devoid of activity. Frustratingly, I'm still getting reddit links from my friend, which I leave unopened. Maybe Reddit took a hit in terms of users and post quality, but I'm growing increasingly skeptical that a mass migration is going to happen.
I got a lot of people from the r/place Fuck Spez movement to switch over. I also got really enlightening advice from one of our supporters. They told me that people will come over once we become easy to use and well established, which we're nearing but not there yet.
With all the third party apps we have gotten like Liftoff and Voyager, things have been a lot more accessible. However, we still have lots of work to do.
Until we become easy enough to use that you feel comfortable telling your family members to sign up and they use it without assistance, we will primarily be a community of tech savvy individuals.
I found a large amount of the developer / programming reddits died, so I noticed a large difference but a lot of other subs there has been no change so it depends on what you are in.
I don't think any platform collapses overnight. What you have to do is do is make something "better" and engage in a campaign of attrition to get people to move over. Produce content that other visitors see and like. Submit links to that content to aggregators (e.g. Slashdot / Fark etc.). Even start submitting links on Reddit that lead over to Lemmy and so on.
Make Lemmy feel as normal as Reddit. People will get used to the interface, the quirks and perhaps stay. Every person who stays is one less for Reddit. Now "better" is doing some heavy lifting since Lemmy has some advantages (ad free, federated) and some disadvantages (inline media & limits, sign up confusion, app). The disadvantages need to be addressed and the advantages need to be made stronger.
Maybe some are waiting for Boost or other 3rd party apps but there will likely not be a super big number coming over. Apparently doom scrolling is preferred for a large swath of Gen Zers
Need to focus on improving these communities and being active/creative especially in building niche communities on Lemmy.
I see so many communities created with just a link or two posted weekly by community creator. That kind of activity gives Lemmy a bad look.
only thing i cant stand about lemmy is trying to understand what the fuck it is and how it works.
some top post about a “sub”? “lemmy place”? idk what to call it, “defederating from us”. does that mean from all lemmy things, that lemmy thing? what does it mean to defederate? is there an easy way to browse for subs like reddit?
Just the fact that you can browse Lemmy without seeing advertisements is really nice.
Still, the systems depends on the will of individuals to maintain servers and it’s a bit scary to know that an instance could be gone in an instant if the maintainer doesn’t want to pay for electricity anymore.
No, and I (honestly) don't care either. A nice sum of users is better than a bunch of users that are (at most) "rotten apples" willing to denigrate everything and everyone.
The whole obcession with Reddit is getting a little too much and continuing it is maybe a bit immature.
I mean, I get it: I've left a couple of jobs during my career (now spanning over 2 decades) because they did some pretty asshole things and I had a choice to move to better pastures, yet after leaving I still had a strong want for them to somehow be screwed for being assholes, kept wanting to know how things were back there and would've been happy if I found out they did go somehow screwed.
So it is understandable, IMHO.
However there comes a point when you gotta mentally go "I'm in a better situation now and they don't matter to it, so there's no point in wasting any energy on them" and stop looking back.
Sure, feel free to tell others about Lemmy (for said others rather than because of Reddit), but stop wondering about Reddit.
PS: I wrote "immature" because as I grew older it just became easier to turn another leaf and getting over the "old place", so I reckon it's maturity, but maybe it's just me.
I believe that most of the people, including myself, are still waiting for proper 3rd party apps. I still use Boost for Reddit untill the developer releases Boost for Lemmy, then I switch completely. The app I'm used to is more important to me than the platform I'm using. But.. Needs to be said that Reddit's behaviour is horrendous and therefore I don't want to be using it. The future is decentralised..
I doubt there's been enough people moving to create an impact. I used to visit Reddit multiple times a day but now it's once a week if at all. When I have looked all my old subs look no different really.
Long ago I posted on Reddit that publicly traded companies are the plague for our society as they are pushing to the eternal growth at the expense of their users.
I do agree that privately held companies are also looking for profit but the difference is that they are not subject to the immense pressure to exponentially grow.
And now the Reddit IPO comes to prove just that. I am fairly confident that if not for this IPO Reddit wouldn't try so hard to push those changes and would still thrive.
But at the end of the day, I am happy that it helped me to discover Lemmy and this debacle is why I am here and not there.
For sure the quantity of posts is the same, but the quality has gone down.
You can just feel it all over. My frontpage has little to no good topics anymore. I used to peruse for at least 30 mins easily losing myself. I barely get 5 now before getting irritated with the low effort material.
I mean I try to go on reddit and the content just isn't what I am looking for. I know this is true for all of you. I know the internet is changing and fediverse things are the future. I am glad to be off the mainstream stuff and digging around in the weeds with folks who might give me a ride hitchhiking. I like to think of it like all the reddit traffic are people who would never give you a ride if you had your thumb out, but the people here would be the types that are more willing to take that risk and make a new friend. Overwhelmingly, hitchhikers will not hurt you and everyone has a great time. Dispelling the fear we live with is what this is all about too.
Profit wise, absolutely not. However, they are probably losing their most technical users. Generally the ones that have some sort of tech background or knowledge and see through their BS, and who are also much more likely to support open source alternatives (and third party apps) and have an easier time figuring out the fediverse. Maybe they care about that, maybe they don't (probably don't).
I honestly rarely if ever posted on Reddit. I just had an account and used a third party app to keep up to date with some tech stuff. But their behavior so revolted me that I came here and actually got involved being on Lemmy.
While I doubt they ever made any money off the crowd that left (cos let's be honest, we know about ad-blockers, etc.), if the most active users left, their content will suffer, and hence the website's general attractiveness probably also will.
There are small subreddits that are definitively private now. But only very small ones.
Idk, I deleted my account when the protests happened and got a little curious when Brodie posted a video on lemmy.
Towards the end it felt like there were a lot more smart asses, dead jokes, and gate keepers ruining the fun anyway. It may just be me but it felt really unique/full of originality at first and then it really became full of the same thing over and over again.
I'm deleting all of my posts and comments on Reddit :). I did find Reddit very useful in many ways. That was when I was a participant in the system. Now Reddit is going to make me a revenue generating serf. So I noped right out of there just like I did with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
I know lots of users are doing them same. Reddit would get lots of exposure from Google searches to useful information that users had posted. They are selling ads on the backs of these users that posted useful information. If I remove my posts (useful or not) they can't be used for revenue.
So at night I slowly go through my profile and delete posts and comments while I watch a show.
Still seem like the same amount of people over there. I really haven't noticed much, other than a lot less dissenting opinions as far as ideology goes. Admittedly, reddit stopped being a regular thing for me, as my political leanings differ from most of the users there. I'd rather walk around dog shit than willfully stepping in it. My work also has picked up and I've found other things to occupy my time.
I honestly think that Lemmy/Fediverse success is more valuable than Reddits downfall. With current leadership Reddit will continue to stumble and Lemmy will continue to grow. It's just a matter of time and either way Lemmy doesn't need to replace Reddit just become it's own thing. I'd rather hang out with you nerds than with bots and spammers on Reddit.
Ribbit
The good thing is, I really don't care. Lemmy/Jerboa catapulted me from feeling bad for people staying on enshittified reddit to not thinking about them at all.
The point is not an overnight collapse. It’s gradual rot.
Reddit (Twitter, Facebook…) all exist because they created a monopoly around their service. Reddit through their incompetence created a competitor. They will have to work so much harder to make their ends meet now that there are alternatives. Worse yet, the viability of Lemmy will spawn other efforts.
Look at Twitter. Between Mastodon and Bluesky they are eroding. They have to beg advertisers to stick around. At the same time there is a bakers dozen of other efforts underway all creating a new landscape. Twitter was the king and now they are rapidly becoming one in a pool of microblogging services. They will wither.
Reddit just popped it’s monopoly and will also fail.
I don't miss reddit, only use it when I need tech advice and cannot find it elsewhere
It looked to me like it strongly depends on which sub. Some are basically unaffected. Some are very different (In a bad way) some are dead.
Not at all. And it's fine.
Nah. Not yet, at least. Reddit is still largely intact as a community despite the severe hatred of the admins, and Lemmy hasn't even come close to maturing yet. Once the lack of effective moderation starts to sink in, and Lemmy starts getting bigger and filling in more niches, people will probably be more keen on switching.
The right-wing troll posters have gotten bolder and more prominent in subs I used to visit that's for sure. They used to get heavily downvoted and people used to rebut their garbage, but much less so now.
I don't think Reddit will feel a noteworthy sting anytime soon. But that's okay. Like some here have already said, what matters is fediverse ultimately growing big enough for us to have a sizeable group of people to interact with regarding hobbies or any random topic posted here.
Although, I can't move on without whining about the bug or whatever it was that prevented me from commenting anywhere for the last ...almost a month! On rare occasions, I couldn't even see anything on my feed so Lemmy clearly has ways to go in regards to matters outside of its contents.
I don't know generally how people have reacted, maybe a lot just quit browsing that type of media altogether. They haven't all flocked to the Fediverse that's for sure. It's grown a lot recently, but before the API mess Reddit had almost a half billion monthly active users. There's like 150k right now between Lemmy and kbin so pretty insignificant in comparison.
I'm pretty sure the quality of posts on Reddit has fallen noticeably, they lost a a good number of mods and people have said it's pretty obvious now.
What I find funny is the favorable references Spez has made to how Elon is running Twitter (X), but thing is it's obvious now Twitter is intentionally being run into the ground. Since Spez is a Elon protégé I guess Reddit is being intentionally run into the ground.
It hasnt suffered a lot - so far. But it is like Chinese water torture - drip drip drip, bit by bit it is slowly eroding, some subs far worse affected than others. Most niche subs and local subs are still going strong, but I suspect after a while they will start to collapse one by one as moderators leave and users come here, or to discord or other alternatives
As much as I want to see reddit burn, I think we are more likely to see a slow, almost imperceptible crumbling away
I wouldn't be surprised if Lemmy got a large bump over the last few weeks, but with how many issues there are on Lemmy in terms of the servers going down and such, I wouldn't be surprised if the daily number of visitors here levels off and possibly even starts to decrease as users get tired of this.
Heck, just to post this comment took about 2 hours to on and off servers showing as being down. I can understand some growing pains as the site grows, but many users won't.
I personally visit Reddit less than I did previously. And from the subs I was part of there does seem to be a drop off in new posts that are not the usual begging for help or complaining about how "x" (not the artist formerly known as Twitter) sucks just to bitch.
So there is still a lot of traffic there and content created, it is just more slanted to the mindless type of content than it was before in my experience.
I will never know because I am never going back to reddit ever.
At least when I see them advertising making ads on Facebook everyone is negative to them
Reddit suffers at the hands of Spez, Lemmy is just existing.
I spent some time on reddit recently and it felt even more like I was talking to children most of the time. Constant arguing which quickly turns into insults makes it impossible to have any productive conversation. Maybe it has always been that way and using lemmy provided a direct comparison, but I'm not sure that I want to be on there any more.
There was no mass migration (yet). For starters, I'd say that the majority already uses the official Leddit app and does not care (like two out of three people I know who casually browse).
It also doesn't help that some apps like RIF still work in some capacity. At the moment you can still browse non-NSFW, but only logged out, and that's enough for some.
Furthermore, this only reflects mobile usage. I still browse Reddit using old reddit (up until they kill that), but have deleted all my content and refrain from posting new comments.
As much as I want to say we wonnered, we are the vocal minority. Some subs I frequent, like /r/PCMasterRace and /r/leagueoflegends didn't even protest.
Yes, Reddit posts have subjectively felt more repost-y and soulless, but we don't have the insight.
There was no mass migration. Quite a few communities I enjoyed don't even exist in a meaningful way over here. Perhaps after 3rd party apps truly die, awards are gone, and they kill old reddit, but that's a big if, not when.
I'm not particularly active on the Fediverse, but that's primarily because even my regular Reddit usage had atrophied in the last year or two. I've kinda gotten out of the habit of looking at site aggregators, so that's more likely my problem.
Realistically, who really knows? Reddit isn't going to release numbers, so it's all third-party stuff at this point.
It's evident in the quality of posts and comments in the old place.
I don't really mind the lower traffic here. Seems like all the intelligence left the old building at once. Either that or I've forgotten just how trash it had become.
I think lemmy has a lot of growing pains before it can become a full fledge alternative for the masses. Updates need to happen, and a sustainable business model needs to come about for admins to cover costs
When it became clear that Reddit no longer saw me the user to be as valuable as the content I had helped to create, I knew it was time to go. I had been on Reddit for almost twelve years, so I was a bit reluctant at first.
I left reddit for the most part in June.
I deleted my account a few days ago. I also deleted most of my posts before I left. Fuck you Spez!
No idea. Don't really care that much. I was fairly active on reddit (had a few 100k post karma) but I went through and scrubbed my posts. The few times I have posted there in the last month is to direct people to Lemmy.
Seen instance wars, admin egos, random censorship and many other fediverse issue.
Not looking forward to ir anymore to be honest.
IMHO reddit is still the same. Looking at /r/all is about the same. Among the smaller subreddits that I care about (programming subreddits), the activity has decreased, but I think it's recovering a bit.
Lemmy can absolutely replace my previous /r/all experience, but the programming communities are still too small.
I started using Mastodon 3 years ago and only now can I say that it has replaced my previous Twitter experience.
I'm confident that Lemmy will become more relevant, but this should take more time.
It would be really cool if all us ex-redditers sued Reddit and Google for "unjust enrichment" which is a cause of action in most states. They're are currently taking OUR comments and selling them, meanwhile paywalling the platform. If each of us went to the county clerk and sued them for whatever is the maximum for small claims court, it could be thousands of petty little lawsuits that would cost them a fortune in lawyers. Or end up being a class action suit that could put them out of business. If they ignore the suit, they lose. When you file the suit, you file a discovery asking reddit and google to provide all your comments properly identified by date, etc,; And also for copies of their contract and to identify and produce any other party and contract that they may have sold your comments to. That alone is a huge pain in the butt for them. You have to prove that you contributed to reddit, that they sold your comments and earned money. I can't do this as a nomad, but it would be cool. Could be a good exercise for a young lawyer here.
Tried to look up some statistics about it earlier today, but couldn’t find anything that would have covered the events after the blackout. Apparently it’s too early to tell just yet. Hopefully someone will publish relevant graphs later this year.
If twitter is still going strong, short term Xification doesn't affect social media that much.
Isn't the fact that we're all here writing comments self-explanatory?
Permanently Deleted
The fact that none of this was planned and executed well is going to weight on the outcome way more than the panicky inhumane greed they're showing. People might not care about the injustice but systems WILL fail if not set properly. That's why people think like 2 seconds ahead. Spez can't do that so he's doomed to fail at some point. The whole snowball thing is really hard to predict
It doesn't really feel like it. I am one of the Reddit refugees, but I'm not sure how much longer this place will fill the void. Curating my feed is really difficult on lemmy, and the hot/active sorting is a joke. I also find that this place is much more of an echo chamber than reddit (which is really saying something), there's just no room for dissenting opinions, they're immediately shouted down.
I really don't want to go back to reddit, so I will hold out here as long as I can, and hopefully some improvements will come along in time.