Reddit killed off almost every third party app and had half of the site shut down for a few days, but still came out ahead with a site that’s still very active and with the bonus of pruning unpaid mods who would’ve been likely to disrupt the site again.
Reddit’s only realistic time to IPO was mid-pandemic.
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.
r/anime does a weekly ranking of show discussion threads based on activity.
Fall 2022, week 2: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fu...
Fall 2023, week 3: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One big place I’ve found Reddit helpful in recent years is a niche community about a chronic illness I have. Initially for collecting more information and insights than I can get in a 15 minute doctor appointment, then a sense of community and realizing I’m not alone, and then over time by giving me a chance to pay it forward by sharing information with others. Last few weeks I’ve realized ChatGPT can be helpful for the first one. The second I’ve started to shy away from because I’ve realized I don’t want the condition to be a core part of my identity, and the third there might be better ways to achieve (likely offline).
Think you’ve inspired me to get off of it for a while. Thanks!
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.
For many, it seems like religion fills an important void in their life. When they imagine me without a religion, they see me having that hole. But I never felt an absence in the first place. I didn't adopt a religion the same way most people don't, say, adopt a giraffe. I never woke up with "the pain of giraffe-less-ness", so never decided to get a giraffe.
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.)
7 years clean, I'm never going back.
Mindfully heading to reddit (relying on various subreddits as a resource for product reviews or technical support) is even more varied: gaming sites instead of r/games, googling for product reviews instead of heading to a niche subreddit, etc. I'll also visit reddit if it's a promising google result, but resist the old habit to add "site:reddit".
It would be great if there was an easier way to share subscriptions.
BPS Space, Simone Giertz, Stuff Made Here, DIY Perks, Aaed Musa, This does not compute, rctestflight, Tom Stanton, lftkryo, upir, Nerdtronic, Design Prototype Test
And then just stuff I like - Adrian's Digital Basement, Cathode Ray Dude, Retro Recipes, Tim Traveller, Dave's Garage
https://www.youtube.com/@BPSspace
https://www.youtube.com/@simonegiertz
https://www.youtube.com/@StuffMadeHere
https://www.youtube.com/@DIYPerks
https://www.youtube.com/@aaedmusa
https://www.youtube.com/@ThisDoesNotCompute
https://www.youtube.com/@rctestflight
https://www.youtube.com/@TomStantonEngineering
https://www.youtube.com/@lftkryo
https://www.youtube.com/@upir_upir
https://www.youtube.com/@Nerdtronic
https://www.youtube.com/@DesignPrototypeTest
https://www.youtube.com/@adriansdigitalbasement
https://www.youtube.com/@CathodeRayDude
https://www.youtube.com/@RetroRecipes
ZackFreedman is another good marker, although he can be a bit goofy.
If you like mechanical things in general, both SouthMainAuto and HVACRVIDEOS are fantastic.
What a blast from the past! Thanks for sharing.
Peetube would be something very different which, to my surprise, doesn’t exist.
Honestly once you break the (to me addictive) loop of opening reddit/lemmy you're not missing out on much. Whenever I get a reddit search result it redirects to my selfhosted libreddit instance (connect through tailscale). Public libreddit instances are basically always broken, but a single user one which is just used for the occasional search result works perfectly fine.
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.
Hacker News has much less content and less content diversity. I very rarely go beyond the first page of HN, and only like a quarter of the posts at most are something that I'm interested in enough to actually spend time looking at.
The velocity of HN is also much lower than Reddit. If I check the front page again an hour from now it'll be mostly the same set of posts.
It also helps that comment sections here are smaller and that HN doesn't have pictures or other easily-bingeable content.
HN is also less likely to get me worked up over nothing. Partially because the comment section is more mature, partially because the community doesn't regularly discuss topics that get me worked up.
Edit: Another thing that came to mind: If I do accidentally visit HN too often, seeing nothing new on the front page make me realize I'm checking it too often and helps me realize I need to focus better or seek out something more productive to do.
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.
> 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
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.
I'll take it !
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.
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.
Sounds like Reddit itself has recovered in terms of raw numbers, but I (and others) have noticed yet another downtick in quality. Lot more bots (AI craze doesn't help. And despite the API narrative being used to counter them, they probably suferent the least), comments seem to be as hostile as early pandemic. But these are hard to measure objectively.
It could just be that the longer you're on there, the worse the quality appears to get to you as newcomers come. People always start to feel that way after being there some time. But then again people have been complaining about the quality of reddit going down literally almost as long as reddit has existed.
I think a much more effective strategy would be a user-led LLM "spamming" campaign.
Package up a lightweight, easy to use LLM for Windows users and let them turn their accounts into noise. Purposely generate overly-argumentative, blatantly wrong prose on every subject and in every subreddit.
Reddit would hate that. Just a hundred users engaging in it could probably tank the quality of the whole site.
Because of those things Prank spammers usually don’t last long. Usually a small gang of people will try something like that and you can quickly ban them. They might try to come back on new accounts but eventually tire of it and find another way to keep themselves busy.
I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, but it would be more difficult than you might think. If you try to automated completely it would cost you an awful lot in fees (Open AI’s server bills are “eye-watering“ and if you go past the free limit they start passing that cost onto you), and the admin’s would probably be able to identify the accounts doing it and ban them site wide.
Also hugely immoral.
If you don't like Reddit and decide to not use it: fine, your choice, obviously.
But completely fucking over a platform because you don't like it? That's an entirely different thing. Who are you exactly to decide how Reddit runs it site?
This is just a DDoS attack, but in a slightly different form.
Reddit and its userbase have always been on the activist spectrum (SOPA, PIPA, CEO changes, API changes, etc.) And before it, Digg was much the same. Given the fact that they'll brigade r/Place with automation tools and protests, I'm surprised it hasn't happened in the form of a broader protest.
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.
> If I had noticed that, I still would've needed one of the very clever people here to explain the significance.
I don't know if that's sarcastic or serious or if that's some dig at me? What an odd comment.
I also suspect that smaller subs are a more useful measure than these huge subs, because I'd expect them to die off much quicker than the huge ones with a lot of inertia.
That said, I understand it can be annoying having 16 people tell you you're wrong all in slightly different ways. It's the price of posting on the internet I'm afraid. But it was (and still is!) the top post on this thread, even though it's not just factually wrong, but spectacularly factually wrong – which is fine, everyone is wrong sometimes – but people do have the tendency to point that out. As long as it's not a pedantic point I don't think that's wrong even if there's a comment already, if you think you can make that point better.
The data is useless as an absolute measure of activity, sure, as described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425501. The message at the top of the main subredditstats page says, "...the data collector is not robust, and so the numbers should only be used as a general guide." You can read that. Let's assume I can read that, too.
But it does track as a representative sample of trends. Picking something less noisy than a niche sub, we can ask whether there have been recent newsworthy events that might show up as spikes in this data. And, there is: look again at the posts/day and comments/day graphs on https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews, and you see clear spikes in activity right around October 7 -- well after Reddit's API changes would have affected subredditstats.
If the data collector has only been able to pick up, say, approximately 20% of the site's activity for each subreddit, then trends are still trends as long as the data collection hasn't changed in a radically new way. And, sure, that could be the case after Reddit's API changes, but as I pointed out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425150 (and as supported in another user's reply using an entirely different source of data), the API changes don't line up precisely with the change in user activity, and Reddit is clearly, observably, less active now in all of its large subs.
Now, for my part, I assumed this would all be pretty obvious stuff. I'm not doing a terribly deep analysis here; I'd expect anyone else to see the same things at a glance. But a few people seem to think that because the numbers aren't a perfect match, the entire point just collapses and clearly Reddit is now busier than ever, and those people are completely missing the point. Using a 12,000-subscriber sub with the noisiest possible data to try to disprove sitewide trends is even more wrong, and then smugly saying, "everyone is wrong sometimes", is not just condescending, but frankly embarrassing.
The diametrically opposing argument here is that Reddit is perfectly healthy and the API changes and blackout protest had no significant impact on the site, and that checks notes 12,000 subscribers in r/thethickofit are sufficient evidence for this. And, like, okay, if that's your argument, cool, carry on, just come out and say so.
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.
> The insults in the show are often colorful and inventive, but they can be quite explicit. Due to their explicit nature, I won't provide a verbatim quote here
You can ask it to not filter profanity, but it seems I need to do it every other message. In general ChatGPT is about as useful as a marzipan dildo here.
I'm willing to bet that exactly 0% of the content of that sub is LLM generated, and the same for most of those smaller subs. Who even cares about these tiny subs? Certainly not Reddit.
Even if this was true (which I seriously doubt), how can you prove that, and what makes you think the subredditstats website cited above would be able to tell the difference?
The operator freely admits his/her stats probably underestimate real traffic due to the expense of collecting data, and they make no claim to having software to detect real commentors from fake. Meanwhile the real internal reddit stats available to mods show numbers that are both much higher and much closer to the live traffic we can see for ourselves as readers.
How much of Reddit's engagement is faked is up for debate - I suspect it's less than we think. However, it'd be really funny if, say, when Reddit IPOs, someone at /r/WSB catches onto this and triggers a bunch of people shorting the stock.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmeDzx4SUME via https://www.themarysue.com/reddit-fake-account-origins/
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/red...
And if it wasn't, everybody would be doing it. What makes you think reddit would have an advantage in doing that over anyone else?
Some malicious actor is fabricating 100 comments a day about the nitty gritty of the New York Times crossword?
But Reddit probably has the scale to do without in popular parts of the site.
Put aside peer pressure for a moment, couldn't you create your community on Lemmy to make sure that you are always in control of your social media presence?
Yeah not sure how it works over there with new platforms and everything but that won’t just fly here.
I do browse the fediverse and am somewhat ambivalent so far. It's definitely at a crossroad point where the next 2-3 years will determine whether it's the next Blender, or the next Gimp. And my biggest fears is that usability won't be prioritized in order to ensure that it won't be the next GIMP. There's a lot of core UX to rework to make it more intuitive.
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).
I suspect this is the bigger issue to be honest. I certainly stopped because of this. Not that I begrudge people having OF or advertising that, but please, for fuck's sake, stay on-topic, and don't spam the fuck out of things with content barely related to the sub's topic.
I also really hate the shift in language to be more personal; e.g. "would you like to [..]" / "I would like YOU to [..]" and stuff like that. It's just creepy and manipulative. Sell your pr0n pics, fine, but don't pretend we have some sort of personal relationship, because we don't.
Also imgur's NSFW purge probably didn't help.
Particularly where "weird" fetishes are involved, the rates for custom content can be pretty exorbitant, but still a drop in the bucket for the clientele.
I wonder where those posters went to though. Lemmynsfw is nice but very sparse.
Ps OnlyFans spam was killing it for longer already
I just hope the fediverse or any other alternative is preparing itself for that next big drama. Because I feel it's a matter of when at this point, not if.
The question is, does the Fediverse want this level of responsibility? Moderating ordinary content is hard enough, moderating porn is worse because of all the legal liability: various countries have extremely strict laws regarding access of minors (e.g. Germany), there are various definitions of CSAM (again, Germany being very strict by banning not just anime "minors" aka lolicon but also textual erotica of such), then there is the issue with "revenge porn" and getting that deleted across the Fediverse...
But at the same time, I doubt all instances will clamp down and ban it. It brings a lot of traffic and I'm sure many moderators have strong free speech vallues and will defend it under that banner. It's extra work but some will take it up. There will most definitely be NSFW-dedicated instances in the worst case.
fight the power!
The downfall of Digg led directly to reddit and the death of Mr. Schwartz began reddits long path into slow enshitification.
That's not to say that Reddit has a great, glorious future. But by any quantifiable metrics, Reddit "won."
They shut off API access to their data around the very same time. Is that a coincidence?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.