Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

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.

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.

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.

One of my favorite conspiracies is that reddit is mostly just LLM's and paid agents talking to eachother. Employed by various intel agencies, governments, and reddit themselves trying to astroturf and sway conversation in one direction or another.

While this is absurdly conspiratorial, there is a grain of truth to it: early on in Reddit's history, the admins created fake accounts and posted on them to boost engagement[0]. More recently, after the blackout and user exodus, /r/de noticed a bunch of new German-language copies of popular English-language subs being created with a bunch of autotranslated comments[1]. So Reddit's administration is not above creating fake accounts and content to juice numbers.

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...

It's one thing to add stories to a startup website and created the illusion of a couple dozen users instead of just zero. But all these years later Reddit has millions and millions of unique users per month and is still one of the top ten most visited websites in the US and has been for many years, beat out only by google/meta properties and wikipedia etc. You can fake "activity" internally but it's harder to fake stats calculated by independent evaluators.

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?

It’s also facially absurd to anyone uses Reddit beyond scrolling the front page.

Some malicious actor is fabricating 100 comments a day about the nitty gritty of the New York Times crossword?

Yeah if their AI commenting is all that good/convincing they should get out of social media and start the next trillion dollar company.

It's not that Reddit is faking their own stats. The conspiracy theory is that these fake users are created by various non-Reddit organizations to promote an agenda, sell stuff, gather intelligence, etc. Reddit's level of awareness and complicity is secondary.

Wouldn’t those same people just do the same thing everywhere on social media across the Internet though? Because if so it’s still doing well in the relative rankings.

They specifically reposed users content from other platforms then pinged them that it was being discussed on reddit. It's what caused me to use reddit for the first time.

This is why I say that anonymous sites like Reddit are not Social Media. If I am on there, there is zero proof that anyone else commenting is a human. They all could be bots and I have no way to prove otherwise.

What would be a non anonymous social network, Facebook? This very much applies to them too, iiuc..

On Facebook, there are connections to my family, friends, acquaintances. I know they are real because I’ve interacted with all of them in real life.

On some of the niche travel-related subs like r/bikepacking, it’s actually quite common to run into one’s fellow redditors in real life on some popular route around the world. You definitely know the high-value posts are coming from real people. Some posters aren’t anonymous at all, because they also have linked YouTube or Instagram accounts that use their real name and face. And from e.g. the person’s gear, the past travels they describe, or the internet drama they have witnessed, it’s easy to identity a person you run into as a fellow member of the sub.

Oh, the full-blown version is not just about reddit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

You are axiomatically not wrong about bots. That's what all the platforms in the Reddit genre do to fill content voids. It long predates sophistication like LLMs. It's like bots in a poker room site. The UX would suck without them.

But Reddit probably has the scale to do without in popular parts of the site.

It seems more likely that subredditstats.com detected that "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." given that that's what it says in the big wall of red text at the top.

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

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.

Yeah, that's a load of bollocks. 90% of that sub is just people quoting applicable insults from that TV show at each other, most of which probably won't make sense if you haven't seen the show. This isn't something that's easy to mindlessly spam LLM-spam at. Actually, many probably won't pass ChatGPT's profanity filter; ChatGPT says:

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.

I still have mod status on a large-ish (70k+) subreddit so I can view reddit's internal traffic statistics for it, and these estimates are definitely wrong.

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.

is your sub growing?

Yes, still. I’m a mod on a few other decent sized subs (30k-ish) actually and most of them are still growing, unless the topic at hand is clearly outdated.

Reddit throttled its API usage a month before the great 3rd party purge, so I'm guessing whatever collection method that site was using simply doesn't work correctly anymore. Or worse yet, the remnants of the API spits out completely incorrect data itself.

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.

I'm on reddit a lot less these days, but subjectively it seems about the same for me, except most of the old subreddits I'm a legacy mod on are way busier than I remember. They're definitely still gaining users.

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.

In my opinion Reddit has a content problem in the same way 24 hour news does. Simply put, there's not enough content to put up constantly so it's supplemented with repeating memes, reposts, and drama.

At the end of the day it comes down to the upvotes, though. If the other users are on your wavelength, you’ll probably like whatever they recommend. But over time you could have less in common with the average user there, meaning what they upvote will be less relevant to you too.

In practice subs are always growing while there's activity on it, because barely anyone ever leaves a subreddit.

This is true. But we are also up in terms of page views per month, unique visitors, etc., etc. reddit has probably been getting gradually bigger each year for as long as I can remember, and it doesn’t look like that trend has peaked off yet. At least not the subs I have access to.

Did you participate in the blackout? What was your impression of it? Were any of the tools you used impacted by the API ban?

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.

While an interesting idea, the problem is that the majority of users would be more bothered by it and they simply don't care enough about Reddit's management to fight it.

I don’t go on Reddit that much anymore and I haven’t been active as a mod on that sub for a very long time. But based on my experience doing it, users are quite good at identifying stupid bullshit and reporting it to mods, which makes it easy to spot. Plus they downvote low quality comments like crazy so it gets buried and people don’t even see it.

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. The mod queue feature is quite efficient so we can ban reported junk much faster than they can post.

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.

My sub has around ~2K subscribers and still growing, ~200-300 new subscribers every month.

Why are you there, though? Can't you grow your community in any platform that is less user hostile?

I am from a Facebook obsessed country, I think Reddit is a good alternative. The discussions are healthy though I’m surprised.

I don't think there is a fundamental problem with reddit's userbase for smaller communities. But I think that we should avoid centralized platforms at all costs. Sooner or later, you will realize that "your" sub is not really yours and that you just gave a lot of your time and work for someone to exploit the data mine.

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?

If you're obsessed with ensuring others can't make money running something like Reddit then sure

The obsession is not with "others making money", but "others making money by being Surveillance Capitalists" and "neutralizing oligopolies whenever possible".

I wish I could give you a great answer. But my country is not really tech savy in a sense, that it even takes convincing to have them sign up over to Reddit from Facebook.

Yeah not sure how it works over there with new platforms and everything but that won’t just fly here.

to be fair, we are saying this on yet another centralized platform. It's just that HN doesn't pretend to be "my/your" community.The upside is that at least the mods here are paid ones who won't ban you based on their particular mood that day.

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.

For what it's worth: many of the NSFW subreddits are dead. Even r/gonewild, one of the OGs - either they've gotten closed due to being unmoderated or they've been overrun by onlyfxns spam, or they've been hit by some weird downranking like GW.

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 imagine that will be the upcoming drama after the looming "payout reddit karma" drama passes over. Reddit's been hostile to NSFW posts and I think at some point soon-ish (1-2 years) they are going to pull a tumblr as well. That will be when the site really starts to die.

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.

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...

overrun by onlyfxns spam

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.

This is the internet at large. The porn subreddits must have become part of the dark forest.

https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest

The thing is, that was the desired outcome anyway. Reddit wants to get rid of the NSFW because the big money they want to attract doesn't like anything remotely fringey.

I wonder where those posters went to though. Lemmynsfw is nice but very sparse.

Ps OnlyFans spam was killing it for longer already

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425056

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425415

You should probably also point out the big red text on the subredditstats pages. I didn't see it when I posted the links, since I'm colorblind and hues of red are entirely invisible to me. Also I have trouble counting past the number of fingers on my hands, so I didn't notice that the numbers were a bit off. If I had noticed that, I still would've needed one of the very clever people here to explain the significance.

I didn't see that text either. I just did a quick "let's verify this data" check because it just doesn't match my experience.

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.

A little bit of snark, not directed at you specifically. Several people now have pointed out either the red text at top, or that the numbers aren't an exact match, or both, without themselves bothering to read through this thread to see if those had already been discussed.

IIRC there was just one comment when I posted that (but others may have been posted in the 10 or 15 minutes it took me to write that), and I still feel my comment adds value, because "likely to be wrong" in the warning seems like a rather weak phrasing (can also mean it's correct!), as are some of the other "I think this may be wrong" comments I see here.

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.

So, I don't think it's wrong in a way that matters for this discussion.

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 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.

What did you switch to?

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.

Care to share strong recommendations? Interested in maker spaces, agile, entrepreneurship & prototyping.

I'm going to hit up my history and looks like it's mostly just the basics when it comes to "general" makers.

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

https://www.youtube.com/@TheTimTraveller

https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage

Not the parent, but ClickSpring is one of my favorites, though they don’t post much anymore. Also, ThisOldTony. BenEater, TechnologyConnections, Jeff Geerling, GreatScott!, Wintergatan, bigclivedotcom, JK Brickworks, The 8-Bit Guy, and Usagi Electric are more on the tech side of my subscriptions.

It would be great if there was an easier way to share subscriptions.

Wanted to echo the suggestions of ThisOldTony, BenEater, and bigclivedotcom.

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.

I’d love to get some recommendations as well

I wish I could find a non google version. Peetube exists but needs more content. I check it often but. ..

I am heavily addicted to YouTube now that I've curtailed my Reddit use. I get a tremendous amount of value, educationally and professionally. The trouble is that there's no good content filter in place, and a couple of mindless clicks later and I'm in a tidal wave of imbecilic, mind rotting, dopamine-inducing distractions.

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.

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."

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.)

This reminds me a lot of discussions I've had with people over the years about why I'm an atheist.

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.

I'm not the person you asked but I ended up replacing it with this site...

me too...

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.

Lemmy is pretty great and I still use it now and again, but I've mainly just stopped consuming content in that way. I subscribed to a quality newspaper for news / analysis / opinion; I stay on HN for the technical news & discussions.

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.

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.

For me, mindlessly heading to reddit have been replaced by equally mindlessly heading to either here, discord, twitter, or bluesky. Overall I think the variety is probably a net positive, even if I haven't addressed the root issue of spending time mindlessly.

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".

I switched from social media overall to reading books.

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.

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/

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.

Mind sharing your books and path you would take that improved your programming skills ?

Many of the technical and science stuff is still pretty good. Not like it used to be, but it's a recurring theme, when the Internet expanded, UseNet also became rubbish, "infested by AOL'ers and spam" was the complaint in 1996.

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.

Yup, exact same situation here. There are some subreddits I miss but overall it has been a massive net positive.

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.

I added them to my pihole blacklist, was wasting too much time there.

Many communities are also on Lemmy, though at a much smaller scale. https://mander.xyz/c/houseplants

Yup, same.

Why do you think spending time on HN is better than Reddit?

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.

The attempt to change policy completely failed. Wasn't a stalemate in any sense of the word

Pyrrhic victory for Reddit Corporation?

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.

If those numbers are to be believed, it ruined any chance of their IPO for a couple of years. It's hard to sweep 'we lost 20%+ MAUs because of a policy change' under the rug when users/impressions are the lifeblood of a social media site

I’d wager the interest rate hikes and increasing conservative decision making around acquisitions has a greater impact on pushing back the IPO.

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.

The last moderator uprising killed the ceo (metaphorically speaking) so the latest one doesn’t seem to have done much in comparison. If they’ve stopped growing and started shrinking that’s bad, but ultimately there’s no replacement yet so don’t sign their death certificate.

reddit mods learn they have no power in the real world, speed run.

We did it reddit![1]

1. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-did-it-reddit

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reddit died with the mobile clients.

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.

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%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.

I'm not sure any platform can nosedive quite like slashdot. I'm not sure what the wreck looked like but the entire culture of slashdot and fresh meat seemed to disappear at some point.

surely Digg had a nosedive of unmatched proportions.

I do remember digg crashing because they were... Using the algorithm to get paid by advertisers and censoring posts, who could imagine?

The downfall of Digg led directly to reddit and the death of Mr. Schwartz began reddits long path into slow enshitification.

How can we Digg Reddit? You are correct the nosedive of Digg was stunning in force and speed. I remember it so clearly.

No, we just never really cared to rise above the noise...

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.

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.

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).

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.

I'm still off Reddit and Twitter, and plan to keep it that way no matter what. Gotta be the change you want to see in the world.

Because of your comment, I made to decision to delete my account. The underlying reason is that I want to shape my life where I only do business with organizations which prioritize (1) quality, (2) integrity, (3) excellent customer experiences. It’s got me thinking about other companies I’m currently doing business with, and how I can make decisions so that my values are put into practice by my actions & behaviors. Thanks!

same here fellow human.

fight the power!

This is the right approach and I did the same. Always surprised how many people here and on other sites whine and moan constantly about how they hate Reddit, Twitter and FB and can't seem to handle even slightest inconvenience to switch ("Oh Mastodon doesn't have a quote-tweet functionality, I can live without it!", "But-but-but my hiking group is on FB!", etc.). You can't argue with big tech companies, the only language they understand is reduced profit.

That’s really interesting data. But isn’t it possible less popular subreddits have picked up the slack?

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

/r/all has turned into a cesspit that makes 4chan look like the Library of Alexandria in comparison.

Yeah anyone trying to determine the outcome just by active users is missing the reality of what the platform has become.

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.

"Pareto skewness" appears in https://hal.science/hal-00700465 (doi:10.1109/asonam.2012.91) from 2012, though I'm not sure whether it has the same sense. Unfortunately, https://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/viewtopic.php?t=319... from 2013 is a perfect match:

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.

Pareto screwed

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.

My constant answer to this is to volunteer oneself.

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.

You can't just sign up as a mod though. The people who are mods are there because they were members of a select clique and when recruiting they're only going to choose similar people. The closest you can get to having an open process is starting your own sub but then: you've always been free to yell where no one can hear you.

Is the data correct tho? Since its mos tlikely using the same api that was cencelled causing th eblackouts.

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).

makes sense. if it was consistently inaccurate, the drop in traffic relative to the moving average would be captured.

It wasn't a "stalemate," Reddit got its way and the subreddits were reopened.

And despite some users leaving, is a steady #18 on SimilarWeb.

That's not to say that Reddit has a great, glorious future. But by any quantifiable metrics, Reddit "won."

sharp drop in July 2023

They shut off API access to their data around the very same time. Is that a coincidence?

No, and in fact, it's almost certainly the cause given the huge disclaimer on the linked page.

Poor, poor Slashdot. For me it was murdered during the 2016 US elections when they welcomed infectiously click bait political shit fest that literally spread to like every story. I contributed at that point for like 12+ years? I couldn't stand the vitriol and moderation clearly didn't function, so cest la vis.

Metafilter too became black and white, politically divided in 2015. Murdered by politics.

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

It has been far from a stalemate. Reddit has won this battle, but the war is not over.

Saying that as someone been dedicating full-time since September to a project to help people migrate from Reddit to Lemmy [0], the truth is that there is simply no alternative yet for all the niche communities that are established there.

About a month ago, I posted here [1] about my project to try to make it easier to sign up and automatically discover/subscribe the Lemmy communities [2], but I wasn't expecting to have such a long tail of communities that need to be mapped out. The ~150 users that signed up to alien.top led to a discovery of about 6000 different subreddits.

I was doing the work of curation and creating alternative communities by hand, but I realized that was going to be an endless task. This is why I started working on a crowdsourced solution [3], which I launched last Friday

[0]: https://github.com/mushroomlabs/fediverser

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38007028

[2]: https://portal.alien.top/

[3]: https://fediverser.network

add this to the list https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/

Anecdotally, it certainly feels worse with an inflection point around July. There are a lot more pop culture posts full of meme comments appearing in global top

. Enough of the people responsible for posting and managing content left the platform to cause a noticeable impact on it.

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.

It's safe money that Reddit will now be a zombie platform

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 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!

I didn't perceive any sharp drop-- quite the opposite. The negative press drove more people towards Reddit.

The average person didn't care about what the mods wanted.

I think in case of Slashdot and Digg et all there were places users went on to. In case of Reddit, while decline might true, there is no such “destination” or a path to migrate to. The users are either coming back or have never gone anywhere in the first place, because that “place” isn’t there.

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.

I wish that were true. I like some small hobby-related sub-reddits, I don't care if a lot people participate. The political trolls and haters are overwhelming. I wish they'd all drop off.

It’s bad data. They changed the way they collect data when the price of API access went up. The drop you see in July 2023 isn’t real.

That's not a stalemate, reddit just won.

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.

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.

Now I’m addicted to TT :dead:

tiktok made tv shows and movies unwatchable for me haha. that kind of media is just too slow. only sports at this point. I would say I watch 45m/day of tiktok. 5m here and there.

this comment cant be real

Not OP and not on TT, but some of my family have told me they have the same issue with movies and TV now.

I assume it's dopamine addiction playing out in the extreme.

I don’t know. I think the writing has gotten bad. I like thrillers and dramas. The old good stuff Ive already watched at this point. It’s nice when I run across something good I havent seen. The new stuff I can just predict what’s going to happen in a way I wish they’d just get to the point. Maybe I dont know whats going to happen but all the dead end loops are just excruciating. I watch some pretty boring sports like F1, motogo, and baseball so even though they go slow and require patience at least there’s some storyline thats not predictable. With tiktok they get to their hook or point within a minute or three so even if I know it’s something stupid I know the point is coming soon or I can just fast forward next. Mine is also curated towards my hobbies so it gives me ideas about what to do next or how I can improve.

I've recently taken a trip into "Weird Fiction", which is scratching my itch for more variety in fantasy.

I'm also finding that just "getting old" means the more books I read, shows I've seen, etc, the more I find myself saying "oh I've seen this kind of thing before". True, non-dopamine-based novelty is harder and harder to come by.

I think they're separate problems, though I'm going to make a huge leap and say that I think the writing problem is actually in part a function of the dopamine problem. Writers are both influenced more by "short media", and required to cater for audiences who enjoy/are addicted to it, even if the product is long-form.

I know quite a significant number of people that said the same thing. But it's not that they can't watch movies in itself: they can't _sit_ through an entire movie so what they do now now is watch those movies on TT, one short clip at a time, spread over a few days.

I’m not at that point. But have been able to create a curated feed of X content. Sort of how certain channels or networks are organized in cable/OTA

i feel this way about twitter since logged out users can't browse tweets anymore. now i can give myself just a tiny bit of friction to break the habit. i still waste time on my phone, but at least it's not quite so effortless now

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.

Narwhal 2 is not bad, IMHO. It’s almost as nice as Apollo on the iPhone, and much better than Apollo on the iPad.

Reddit app, and its Apollongly bad

Fixed that for you ;)

I’m not quite sure what sub I’m reading, what’s user generated, and what’s an ad

I'm unable to tell apart ads properly either quickly on reddit, and given the it's the same user action to collapse a comment and to click an ad that looks like a comment, I've misclicked on ads many, many times. It doesn't help that they place them at the top of the comments section and seem to be deliberately designed to look like gif comments.

As an advertiser I would not be particularly chuffed. I can say with confidence that my accidental ad click rate on reddit is 100%.

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.

Reddit Is Fun (rif) was a well-designed app that just worked. It was fast, had a customisable user interface with defaults that didn't get in the way of enjoying the content, and could run on all of my devices easily, including an Android 7 phone from 2018. It's a shining examplar of what a mobile browsing app should be like.

By comparison, the official Reddit app feels somewhat slower, even on my relatively new Android 12 phone from 2021, having a very noticeable lag when scrolling through articles and comments. For video and photo posts, there's no way of browsing the comments without clicking on the thumbnail and having it auto-play the videos every time, meaning I need to react fast to pause the video (there is practically no way of stopping this). And it doesn't support Android 7 anymore, meaning the only way to access it from my 2018 phone is via the browser.

It baffles me why Reddit would want to cut support for 3rd party apps when they were a key component in the Reddit ecosystem.

Reddit devs are probably the least competent of any modern social media platform. Any talent goes to an actual site, leaving the typical "redditors" () to work for reddit.

Naturally, this leads pretty much any technical project to be doomed from inception.

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.

if a Kagi search takes me there

Same and mainly because Kagi let's me rewrite the url to a private libreddit instance. Otherwise I'd have downranked it.

Apollo still works perfectly if you sideload it: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14nzii3/how_to_c...

https://github.com/ichitaso/ApolloPatcher/releases/latest

https://github.com/EthanArbuckle/Apollo-CustomApiCredentials

What's so great about Apollo I wonder? I've never tried it before :) what does it do differently?

Edit: oh never mind, I've been digging into the links but it looks like it's iOS - only. So that explains why I've never come across it before.

Same, Reddit saved me from it by cutting my 3rd-party app cord.

It's just bizarre to me that they didn't try to buy one of these apps to replace their own. That would've been a net win. It seems instead, as throughout their history, that their leadership is constantly trying to destroy it.

If they had external investors they'd be being hit with shareholder lawsuits constantly.

They already did that it was AlienBlue and thry wrecked it if my understanding is correct

Same here. I'm happily spending more free time on creative and learning ventures.

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.

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.

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.

Exactly this.

+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.

I basically stopped using reddit when they came up with the new web UI, and then pushed me to download the app on mobile. They obviously don't care about users.

On iOS, especially iPad, try:

- Narwhal 2: https://narwhal.app/

Of course, you pay the API costs. But this is pro work, countless UX details thoughtfully made.

- Winston: https://winston.cafe/

- Winston on GitHub: https://github.com/lo-cafe/winston

In TestFlight Beta, OK on iPhone but awkward on iPad unless full screen; layout is jumbled mess in stage manager windows.

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.

I didn't even use Apollo: I was hooked on the official iOS app. And used the blackout to kick the habit. Haven't looked back since. _Some_ of the free time I got back has now gone towards youtube shorts, but since those really requires headphones, I can keep it to a much smaller percentage of my free time. Instead, I bought a subscription to a local news paper, you know, for when you're on the loo and need something to read. I feel I'm better informed now than when I was reading reddit compusively.

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.

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".

The concept of "gatekeeping" has ruined online communities. Remember when "lurk more" was the common advice to new users?

That is still the default. People backlashed against excessive modding and power abuse. Top commenters are still top commenters and guide the conversations with authority. They are still in most threads with the most upvotes.

Communities are defined by the content contributors first and for most. That's something Reddit forgot.

Reddit started with a little bit of modding to clean up the mess which is always needed (how it works on HN). Then every year it seemed to grow and grow, mods were now self-annoited editors of their own pet magazines. A hundred plus mods were added to major subs, where in some 50% of comments can get removed in major threads. r/science has many many threads where 75% of comments were removed, almost entirely as they didn't fit some idea of what should be discussed, what was acceptable.

That's a big difference from RTFM culture on forums.

No, people don't backlash against just "excessive modding". I have witnessed on several subs a belief that mods should never be able to lock a post of a question that comes up several times a week. The thinking goes, for example, that a person posting a discussed-to-death question isn't just looking for an answer to the question, but rather he/she is trying to socialize and feel part of a community. Therefore, mods who lock such posts are cruelly denying a person an outlet for socializing.

You write about developments on major subs, but those are just that, the major subs. Niche hobby subs, on the other hand, often don't see the level of moderation they actually need in order to retain knowledgeable contributors. People with a certain level of proficiency in a hobby will bail if the discussion is predominantly newbie questions or repetitive arguments.

It's interesting to compare r/c_programming and r/cpp. C_programming has a lot of newbie questions, cpp less so. I assumed it was due to C's larger use in education, but now I wonder if it's something to do with moderation.

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.

the quantity has dropped, and dropped significantly

Mine's gone from 1-1.5k to 2-400 posts a day.

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.

That drop in quantity in hobby subs tracks pretty well with the theory that was getting tossed around a few months ago that the most frequent posters and power users disproportionally used third party apps while users of the official app had more of a tendency to be only very casual posters or just lurkers.

Local subs growing despite power users vacating kind of lines up with this too — casual users seem more likely to treat Reddit like one of the bigger platforms like Facebook, seeking out subreddits that are more broadly appealing or based around locality rather than interest-based subreddits.

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.

Since you mentioned r/android, I wanted to ask - have you noticed a drop in quality post the blackouts? There was a point of time when I had read nearly every post there, and all posts would either have 100+ upvotes or would get removed. Now there appear to be tons of low upvote (while legitimate) posts.

I think that of the people that have left Reddit. There are two basic groups.

Those that replaced it with Lemmy, and those that took it as a moment to kick a habit.

I think the latter is the larger group.

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

I don’t know how more people don’t notice this.

I truly believe Reddit themselves are using the bots to fake participation.

This was noticeable immediately after the blackout, with all of the “I’m sorry I’m not allowed to generate offensive content” comments .. which I’m sure they only learned to filter away.

I concur with this. I've spoken with friends at Reddit who tell me that overall post volume is basically back up to normal, but my participation was mostly in smaller subs. Some of them got killed for lack of moderators, some are basically dead because people left and didn't come back, and a couple that are at similar levels of traffic seem to have had a lot of the good posters leave and be replaced by a bunch of shitposters, self promotion, and bots. That said, sounds to me like the conclusion Reddit will take from this is that everything's fine.

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.

The official mobile app is also really persistent about pushing content it thinks you might like which has the unintended consequence of generalizing those niche subreddits to the degree that they lose that niche focus. For example, if every /r/movies user gets /r/criterion pushed to them, the content of /r/criterion will slowly transform to match the tastes of the /r/movie users.

I internally laughed by ass off when I found out my mostly technology inept mother now uses lemmy instead of reddit.

I entirely quit it myself, and when I do end up driving bythe more niche subreddits from typical search results, I find that it feels way more dead.

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.

As if the quality was ever high? Nah, man.

The blackout is one reason for a decline in quality. The other, main reason, is people not wanting their content ingested by ai. That reason applies to a steady decrease in blog content and quality.

This comes from Reddit's focus on mobile. Commenting is now quicker, shorter and likely repetitive. Users don't really read through comments, they just broadcast their thoughts like Twitter.

Yeah and a lot of the Ask posts are dominating and seem like bot posts by being a single simple questions.

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?

Nah. A lot of power users are gone. Now it will slowly slide into irrelevance.

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....

You can be both large and irrelevant. Facebook is perhaps the best example of this. Reddit feels headed in the same direction.

Define irrelevant, because if it has eyeballs...

Facebook has the eyeballs. I don't think it's relevant anymore

What's the criteria for relevancy, if not "do people still use it"?

Are you innovating? Are you top of mind for people? Is your tech transforming people's lives?

I use electricity every day. Is electricity relevant in most contexts for me? Nope. I drive a car every day. Is the type of car I drive relevant in any way? Nope.

Your life as you know it would disappear if electricity stopped flowing tomorrow.

Facebook is no longer the trendsetter but it still influences the daily lives of millions of people and will probably, once again, have a major impact on who the United States next president is. Facebook is highly relevant.

If early adopters have moved elsewhere, and it's all late-majority, it will have the most eyeballs right before it dies out.

Facebook is incredibly relevant. It probably has more impact on more people's lives than Twitter or Reddit. Facebook isn't cool anymore. But for the 30+ crowd, especially the non-college educated crowd its huge. Tons of small businesses use it to host their "websites", the community groups are huge, parents / family groups, facebook marketplace totally replaced craigslist for a lot of people.

Many of the "power users" were outright liabilities for Reddit, and they should consider their departure a good thing.

It depends. When your best content and the filtering of crap content comes from these power users you're in trouble when they leave.

I disagree, they had a lot power users creating the content and now it definitely dropped in quality.

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.

New power users will take their place. The platform is still big and fame. What we've seen is mainly a shift from old to new generation.

I wrote an article [1] back in June about Lemmy and how reddit communities leaving should approach it but it seems like in practice it's been a lot more unstructured than I thought it should have been. Most users/boards are on lemmy.world. That's probably fine though, there are still some more niche boards. I just wish there was a better automatic cross-posting between parallel boards.

Personally I have essentially not used reddit since June outside of following links there from searches. It was the thing that got me to make an HN account after being a passive reader for like 7 years.

[1] https://tr3y.io/articles/tech/reddit.html

Lemmy.world has 143k users. For comparison, a now-banned snuff film subreddit made their own website, and it has over 1M users. Lemmy and similar platforms just aren't very appealing to the hordes of people who left reddit. Those users are getting their dopamine fix from somewhere else.

Speaking of "other platforms", I know of a 3D printing sub that went over to Discord and they have no plans to ever go back. I wonder how many other subs headed over to Discord as well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The distinctive thing about the type of reddit humor I think they're talking about is how referential it is. You don't so much make a clever joke as invoke the standard joke on its trigger phrase or subject.

I see plenty of jokes on HN but they are usually part of a comment that would be made anyway. Joke-only comments also aren't that rare and when they're clever and specific to the context are usually pretty well received.

I've been using both HN and Reddit roughly equally since 2013. A few months ago I started noticing a higher incidence of joke comments here at HN. Fortunately they seem to get down voted quickly.

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.

Be careful bringing up this phenomenon, it's already been explicitly mentioned in the rules [0] - which means that it can't possibly be actually taking place here at all.

Discourse on the internet in general is becoming less open and candid as people self-censor out of fear of retribution, ostracization, and/or cancellation. Expect more people to withdraw into exclusive, closed communities and cliques where frank, quality discussion can actually be had, away from the preying eyes of the censorious authoritarians and moderator types, as well as the vapid Tweet-length, Reddit-style shitposting that the masses bring with them.

Prepare to enter a new informational dark age, far from the original ethos of the early Internet hackers and engineers who sought to democratize and maximize open access to information for all. Now information can be dangerous - it can be false, misleading, misinformative, and therefore its dissemination should be strictly controlled and moderated to prevent people from getting "the wrong idea." Moreover whatever you say online is more likely to be used against you, and so it is preferable to practice a policy of reticence and silence than speak at all.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Because you brought up the "cancellation" bogeyman, I don't think that's it at all.

I think, in general, people got exhausted at just shouting out to everyone. Over the past two years I've significantly drawn back my 'public' social media on favor of having more focused discussions with smaller groups of people. No one benefited (apart from advertisers) from me sharing my every waking thought and opinion to the world.

It difficult to draw much from the "early" internet to now. There's orders of magnitude more people online, with more types of people. Internet access is significantly more abundant abundant - previously you needed to "log in" to the internet. Now pretty much everyone is permantantly online by at least on device they carry on themself

Guidelines, not rules. I think it's a perfectly fair topic on a thread about the outcome of the Reddit blackout.

How do you know they're Reddit-style if you weren't a regular Reddit user? This is literally one of the most common complaints about HN, and has been repeated continuously since HN's inception. It's in your mind. Every forum's activity changes over time, especially as it continues to grow. It's not becoming more like Reddit. Reddit just becomes more like "a forum that grows over time", like every other forum does. Eternal September.

But just to comment on the idea that some comments here are "low quality, like Reddit", I'd like to note that your preferred form of comment isn't necessarily "high-quality". Not in the way you probably mean. Almost all HN comments are low-quality. They're made by the inexperienced, usually sharing opinions rather than facts, with no evidence, often arguing over something banal or subjective, with an aim to correct rather than educate.

There's just not that many experts out there. When there are, and they do comment, they often get downvoted by the ignorant. Instead most people share comments which are more like opinions dusted with a little information they read once and probably don't remember completely accurately. Often comments and conversations get downvoted or flagged purely because someone doesn't like their opinion or disagrees, regardless of whether they might be right or have a genuine argument.

The big difference between Reddit and HN is a HN user believes they are superior. Intellectually, morally, behaviorally, or just in the company they keep. You keep seeing this comment all the time, "Reddit is low-quality, HN is high-quality". But it's not. "Quality" can have many different dimensions and each of those be subjectively preferred based on the person. HN encourages people to share thoughts even if they have no idea what they're talking about. And discussions often devolve into the ignorant arguing over nonsense. It's like a sewing circle for nerds who believe that believing you are smart or right is more important than actually being right. That argument for its own sake is better than making a light-hearted joke. HN is where levity goes to die, and the intellectually insecure reign.

Feel free to substitute "low quality comments" with "comments that I don't find valuable" or simply "comments that I don't like". That's not really the point that I was trying to make.

This is one of the highest quality comments I have seen here in a long time. Ironic that it complains about "quality."

First, you caught my attention by dropping a powerful and memorable term (eternal september). Second, you followed up with an entirely accurate indictment of the problems with this site.

However, you lost your way a little bit at the end. Is it really that hard to recognize that Reddit-tier comments are uniquely low quality content? For at least a decade, that whole site has been overrun by angry people posting comments that not only do not contribute to any sort of intelligent discussion, but actually deter more thoughtful and reasonable people from even bothering to try to contribute. How is this at all controversial for you?

Yes, the “Rockwell Retro Encabulator” - a Reddit favorite - is currently on the front page of HN. Sigh.

I seem to recall it being just as popular reading here ~7-8 years ago. What has always made HN good is the creation of good material, not the sole presence of it.

Yes, I've noticed this trend too. I find this entire thread positively alarming because an influx of Reddit users can be deadly for online communities.

Reddit was useful because it kept those people contained within the reddit.com domain. Now, I fear they are loose on the Internet and we may see many sites/apps/federations quickly deteriorate into uselessness.

The quality of comments on Reddit has also declined.

People have gotten completely lax about downvoting shit, 0 effort comments and childish humor.

Reddit has a right and a need to figure out monetization. This was part of that effort and it was likely painful but Reddit is dead anyway if it never figures out monetization.

I didn't participate in the blackout. I felt the mods were wrong to take that approach.

I did go to bat for blind mods. They need better mod tools than they have.

That comment is here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36232441

Hopefully Reddit does figure out how to both foster attractive communities and make enough money.

I run a bunch of Reddits. One has 20k members and says "top 5 percent" and many have a few hundred and say "top 50 percent." There's a lot more to Reddit than the very big Reddits.

I think the relatively small number of very big Reddits get too much press. That's not all there is to Reddit and I hope they defy the expectations of people already pronouncing them "dead."

They have a right yes, but they will also rightly suffer from their approach. I not only participated in the blackout, but because of the CEOs arrogant comments about how valuable my data is and how they deserve to sell it, while destroying the tools I value and use, I also deleted all of my valuable data from reddit and after handing off the one sub I moderated I left the platform forever.

I think reddit is a wonderful idea that needs different leadership, and the only way for that to happen at this point is for reddit to die and something new and preferably harder to buy out takes its place.

I'm a blogger and freelance writer. I've spent years saying that programmers make good money, then expect slave labor from writers and content developers.

If the only way people will "allow" a valuable service to live is as their bitch, the entire internet is welcome to go die in a fire while we dream up some new answer for the future of this world.

In that case Reddit should die.

Reddit’s decision changed it previous equation with mods, and redefined the limits of power.

Reddit, since inception, had never made specific hire fire decisions for mods, especially for purely monetary reasons.

This makes it less volunteer moderation, and purely unpaid labor.

NB: I would add return on investment to your cabinet of villains.

Reddit allows me to establish a community for free. I've established a number of them.

If people don't want to be unpaid mods, they don't have to be. No one forced them into that.

Do we need to address some things? Sure. But I have long advocated for the right of people to engage in unpaid labor or low paid labor if they choose to.

It's exactly how Founders of startups create the company that makes them millionaires. Saying no one is allowed to without first being rich creates a permanent social divide.

Would I like for there to be a means to get paid for moderating on reddit? Maybe. I certainly could use more money.

Do I want the burdens that typically accompany a paid day job? No. I'm handicapped and that's a disaster waiting to happen.

A lot of this was not intentional. And it's generally not as simple as people like to pretend it is for the sake of argument.

I've spent years saying that programmers make good money, then expect slave labor from writers and content developers.

If people don't want to be unpaid XXX, they don't have to be. No one forced them into that

Insert blogger/writer/mod for xxx.

Maybe it would help, if this contradiction is clarified.

There's no contradiction.

"I can choose to work for free on some things if I wish." does not contradict "Other folks are in the wrong to expect and demand that I work for free."

blogger and freelance writer

Reddit’s writers and content producers, i.e. users, are still unpaid. They’re just also being used to train LLMs aimed at reducing the number of independent bloggers and writers.

They did figure out monetization. Their revenue was skyrocketing over the last couple years before they decided to ruin the API.

Wikipedia indicates it's still a private company. My recollection is they are failing to hit figures that would make for an attractive buy out or IPO.

They grew their employee count massively (400->2000) as their revenue grew over the past few years though. Part of that is, yeah, you have to spend money to make money. But I know for a fact not all of those employees were doing ad sales or direct monetization.

You can speculate as to why they hired so many people: pandemic tech hiring FOMO, looking more attractive to investors, empire building, not being willing to settle for a paltry 10-figure valuation and so trying to build out to hit 11-figures. But they don't need that many people and they could easily become profitable by doing a big layoff (just as money software companies could). At this point it's not a question of survival or existence for them, nor of IPO readiness, so much as it is IPO optimization.

Yeah, just fire most of the staff. It worked so well for Twitter.

I don't know the details. I didn't follow it that closely. I don't care that much.

I've read that the business decision that sparked the blackout had something to do with trying to make money. They're a business, not a charity.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. People want endless amounts of free shit. The people who don't want reddit unless it's both free and takes their orders are people I don't personally sympathize with.

I don't really expect to argue this further. I've already argued it way more than I really care to.

If profitability isn't enough for them, I have no sympathy.

And beyond that, how fast do they expect to grow after this many years? Be happy with a good thing! Their growth rate was very impressive!

Since you run a few subs maybe you know: if modding has gotten harder since the API switch, why don’t mods just bring in more mods to help?

Not the person you’re responding to, but team coordination is a very difficult task as you add people.

It’s difficult enough getting 8 developers on the exact same page when writing code, now imagine trying to moderate to a ruleset with a much greater degree of ambiguity.

I work alone. I accepted the offer to join me on my largest forum once. They bailed within a day or three without so much as saying "bye, bitch!"

I'm not blind. I have no idea if it's gotten harder for blind mods.

Sorry.

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.

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.

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?

It seems like that data should be accessible at:

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?

I'll just wait for the S-1 investor disclosures they put out prior to their IPO.

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.

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.

This was always what annoyed me about people who took this position before the changes. The goalpost was "Reddit is going to topple" - it turns out that the effect of these platforms is so strong that short of them literally going down you aren't going to see a full on collapse.

I think it's surprising because the collapse of sites like Digg and Myspace in the past, but the internet is a bigger/much different place now.

My prediction was the site is going to lose a lot of its niche communities and deep content will be diminished and the site will hollow out over time. It definitely seems like that's what is happening.

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".

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.

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?

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.

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

I heard about Tildes recently and sent them an email to request an invite but they never replied.

Do you need one?

r/all was formulaic upvote-bait for a couple of years before recent events. It was only readable with a robust subreddit blocklist.

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.

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

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.

Reddit feels pretty dead nowadays in comparison. Or at least it is mostly dead to me.

What subreddits did you frequent that now feel dead?

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.

But which subs? You didn't answer...

r/astrophotogramemes for one, but also many other smaller/niche ones I can't even remember nor find anymore since I stopped using them a while ago when this happened - I deleted my reddit account.

I often check out the LaTeX subreddit and I perceive the number of posts are down, even with a pretty recent new mod, who was doing a good job.

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.)

ellen pao blackout

those were some innocent times

They were. Similarly Unidan's crow stuff. I miss those days of reddit.

Honest mistake, pretty sure you mean jackdaw stuff.

Crow, jackdaw, from the same family. I am surprised I remember that much :)

I have already said this multiple times in different threads, but I think the protestors took entirely the wrong approach here.

The only thing that genuinely scares companies whose primary business model is ads is content that is not considered "brand safe". Posting such content, particularly on subreddits where it doesn't belong, would have been a far more effective strategy IMO. Filling the frontpage with porn, slurs, racist memes, made up slanderous stories about the most common Reddit advertisers and other such junk would have forced Reddit's hand.

Many subs did this and the mods got removed real quick. I did the only thing that I could do that actually hurts them, delete my data.

It’s just a website. Doing all this plotting and scheming takes a lot of effort. Not going to a website because it sucks takes no effort.

slurs, racist memes

Reddit has spent a lot of time cultivating a community that would not accept that, even ironically. Any attempt at using "racist memes" to fight the admins would get shutdown by the powermods real quick.

They did this, tho. Many subs did suddenly allow nsfw content. It was very effective. Reddit Corp needed to remove the mods of those subs and replace same with ones that would implement ad friendly rules again. It really showed that the mods are not free in how they run their subs.

If you hated the mods, the mods lost. If you hated the admins, the admins lost. If you were a longtime user that is familiar with Reddit wholeheartedly supporting r/jailbait to bootstrap growth, you won because nothing about the website could bother you.

Was r/jailbait as bad as the name implies? I was a user for about 11 years and have never heard of it.

It was just amateur porn by young adult women or late teen girls, like mirror selfies by women/girls in bikinis with their tops pulled down or ass bent over or whatever, but the people in the photos were very young. Whether that meant 18, 19, or 17, or 16, people weren't too concerned.

Yep.

It was about photos of minors at the beach. CNN ran a story about it and that event was when Reddit started to get much more hands-on about acceptable content.

Gotta say though.... if you make a fresh instagram or tiktok account that same material will be suggested to you while you are in the wide suggestion phase. Kids love taking pics at the beach, which is just one of many reasons not to start a UGC website.

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

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?

I apprecate you joining in on the chaos! It was definitely WAY more attention than I was expecting. That's why I had encouraged people not to pay during the announcement post - I was more aiming to show off a side project rather than launching a platform. It was an absolutely crazy week, especially considering I was launching a larger feature for Figma (my day job) two weeks after that.

Three of the biggest issues was there was an off-by-one error in the payment amount selector (which imo is unacceptable for anything paid), the subscription cancellation button didn't work, and the mobile view (which made up ~60% of the user agent requests) was broken (especially when logged out). I fixed those and started rolling out regular updates as well: https://non.io/#updates

Launched a bunch of new features since, but really what I'm waiting on before promoting and trying to get things off the ground is the iOS app. Overall it's been wild ride, but the thing I'm most proud about is the $119 I've paid out to users. It's a tiny amount in the grand scheme of things, but it proved the platform worked and that the distribution of funds worked.

Welcome to the valley of despair. It is dark. It is cold. You feel alone. You will get through this and emerge stronger than you ever were. Stay the course.

As a casual but persistent user, it pains me to say it - because ethically I support the grassroots side of the equation - but as a path of least resistance to casual, anonymous public engagement on a wide range of topics, there seems no viable alternative. [For a given subjective value of 'viable', naturally!]. So after a period of abstention, I gradually ended up back there, simply because I know of no other sizeable gatherings on certain topics that aren't either annoyingly gatekept (technically, and/or socially), and/or are far more toxic themselves.

Look at HN - simple hierarchical discussion forums with a negligible barrier to entry and no grating artificial limitations, and we quite rightly love it.

In short, I still use Reddit, but there's nothing ideological about that choice.

lemmy is not that empty

agreed. The loss of Apollo was a huge blow to the UX since the official Reddit app is hard to use and has poor design choices (in favor of business choices). Why would the official app have TINY up and down vote buttons? There are countless baffling decisions in the design & functionality in the official app.

Without an alternative to reddit, using the reddit app remains the way to stay informed & engaged in various niche reddit communities.

Looking at these posts people want to be on the "right side" of this issue and I don't get it.

I still use reddit the same today as I have been for the last 10+ years (chrome + RES). /r/all is as bad as it's ever been, however my subbed feed hasn't changed much.

Absolutely nothing came from it. Except for the fact that the best Reddit client and arguably one of the best iOS apps of all time disappeared off the face of the earth.

For some reason, Apollo's creator declined to turn Apollo into a new Reddit. He could've tried at least.

I agree that he could have tried harder. For one, I’d have been willing to get my own API key and paid my own fees to use the app. Like part of onboarding could have been enter your API credentials. Not the most user friendly but better than nothing.

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.

Where did they go?

That sounds like an interesting place. Can you share the Discord?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lemmy's main problem is that the software is a buggy, insecure mess. I speak from helping with a small Lemmy* where a couple of subs decamped. (Both are going very well, and one has actually taken off like a rocket.)

The answer is, obviously, "patches welcome." But this stuff is a bit janky.

The other big problem is that the Fediverse is a collection of software that doesn't quite talk to each other - ActivityPub is a bit underspecified in practice, and you're gonna have to test combinations of actual running code. We've been having a bizarre time just trying to talk to Kbin reliably, i.e. software intended to do the same Reddit-alike job as Lemmy. We almost have two-way Mastodon story and comment flow working, except when the Mastodon has authorized_fetch switched on. Etc etc etc, the problems are a string of little glitches.

OTOH, it basically works well enough to sustain discussion, both local and federated. So everything else is fussing, really.

* https://awful.systems/ official refuge of SneerClub and TechTakes

The answer is, obviously, "patches welcome." But this stuff is a bit janky.

Yeah.

I'm optimistic on this front. Bugs are one of those things that "everyone agrees upon", although you're right in that the Lemmy development environment hasn't taken off or expanded as much as it probably should have. Still, bugs will be fixed because its low-hanging fruit. Everyone gets bothered, someone will get bothered enough and then a patch will be submitted.

The advancements from 0.17 to 0.18.0 to 0.18.5 have grossly improved Lemmy in substantial ways. There's enough bug-progress that I'm happy. There's plenty more bugs, but progress is largely all that I care about.

--------

The deeper concern of mine, and I alluded to this earlier with my "Naive" comment, is that Lemmy is very ideological right now. Ex: There was a week or two where people were against Lemmy Search Engines, worried that they'd track us. (Thankfully, someone made search-lemmy.com and life is better now).

But now we're running into a "Privacy / anti-tracking" problem, directly in relation to this new-user / trolling issue. The most direct solution to the trolling problem is to have a way to track new-users and their early posts to see if they're a bot, troll, or otherwise a fake malicious account. Reddit does this through its Karma system.

But Lemmy is fundamentally against Karma-tracking at the moment, meaning an _actual_ solution to this "trolls just create a new account from an unmoderated server" cannot rely upon karma (right now). I'm hoping that the politics shift enough that we can start talking about Karma-tracking (or other simple statistics that grossly diminish trolling behavior), but its going to be a while before everyone gets convinced IMO.

---------

I think the "Adults in the room" know about the problem. But there's also the need for the underlying community to believe in the problem and have an ideological shift to successfully keep the community in unison.

Or to get more specific: I know the Beehaw.org server wants to join everyone else in the federation. And we all know why they aren't doing so, and everyone respects everyone else's opinions and situation. Until this trolling problem is... addressable (not necessarily solved, but "addressed", so that we have tools to deal with it), it will be best for some instances to just remain de-federated (especially from open-registration servers who are prone to these coordinated trolling-assaults).

I left. Came back and now left again. There isn’t a readily available alternative at the moment. However, the quality has declined so much that it has become garbage. The discussion seems to be driven by bots, mercenaries and AI.

I also think many reddit users moved to HN which resulted in some quality going down as they bring the old reddit culture with them, but I’m betting that won’t last.

I think it’s still early to tell. Reddit still has lots of traction and even if it’s becoming less attractive, the alternative is not quite there yet.

I do find here on HN a lot more low-effort one-liner joke comments and "huh, glad I'm not the only one who misread the post title as XYZ" useless comments.

Previously these would get instantly downvoted and greyed out as not adding to the discussion nor showing curiosity. Now they remain, because a lot more HN users are Reddit refugees who think this type of comment is normal/good.

They're still getting mostly downvoted, fortunately. HN still encourages long form; one of the reasons why I love this site.

If anyone’s looking for alternatives, Lemmy is federated and nice to use: http://lemmy.world/

It’s really only lacking the size of Reddit for me, there isn’t a ton of activity in niche subs, but they’re growing.

From my experience, programming and technology communities are already really strong on Lemmy. I'm confident to say that if you care about these topics, moving from Reddit to Lemmy is a good option.

For another categories, they're still small and having struggles gaining traction to have enough users and posts to be lively. But I think it's just a matter of time if Lemmy continues polishing its features and community discoveries.

Lemmy has been great for me. It took me about a week of scrolling through Lemmy's r/all equivalent to find enough interesting communities to sub and filtering out the rest. Now both my subscribed feed and all feeds are generally high quality and aligned with my interests. It does feel like they're growing.

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

That's interesting

I remember during the blackout that there was an extra push (by reddit paid mods) of pushing content to AskReddit (or maybe they made up a similar sub) and were noticeably creating topics there

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.

I'd say the net change is -$60.

I suspect the big impact will still take a while to appear, which is that reddit alternatives seem more credible. People looking to set up a new community were often picking reddit by default without thinking about it.

Especially for things aimed at teenagers reddit is mostly replaced by Discord. This isn't a new development though and I doubt the API debacle had much of an impact on that.

What are people using now?

I use kbin which links to both mastodon and Lemmy.

Personally I moved to lemmy and hackernews and stopped using reddit because the apps stopped working.

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.

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

I'm one of those who simply left, though I don't know that deleting my account counts as "silently". My usage had already been on the decline at that point, so I just needed that last push to leave for good.

anyone found a decent alternative for apollo on ios?

Voyager is meant to be a direct ripoff, delivered as a PWA. In my usage, it delivers a very similar look and feel, although it is definitely not as feature-filled yet which is understandable for the price.

https://vger.app/

Nothing. They correctly surmised that there are enough people that don’t care and won’t notice the drop in quality.

Then again Reddit is doing all it can to make the site as UX hostile as possible so I guess their network effects are powerful

I think it's more than nothing, though app monetisation may still be enough to justify the loss. The vast majority of users do not contribute content and they certainly don't help moderate communities - a lot of the content that is good on reddit either comes directly from or is facilitated by the people who care a lot, and those people are the most impacted by third party apps going away, old reddit being abandoned, moderation tools being weakened, new reddit obsoleting per-subreddit CSS, etc.

reddit was the place for a lot of communities (and for the most part still is) but there's a lot of places on the internet you can get generic mass-market content, that might be what drives reddit's bottom line but it's not what makes it special. The masses will go to the next popular platform, people interested in specific communities will stay as long as reddit doesn't piss them off. The beauty of reddit is that you can be interested in one or two niche communities, but you soak up the rest of the ecosystem along the way. If the masses go somewhere else and the niche communities are pushed away, there's not much left.

Also to clarify, I don't mean niche as in small, I just mean specific hobbies or interests etc, that's what reddit was good at - not needing to go to some forum to be able to talk about your thing. And by masses I mean whoever is participating in r/pics or r/funny or r/tifu or whatever else.

I stopped having an account at Reddit before the API changes, but there was a change in the way I saw the site over time. I'd be surprised if over 30% of its traffic is legitimate, organic, people just wanting to share things and talk about their interests. So much of many comment threads these days is about getting high scores on algorithms, and there's a lot of copying of high-scoring comments, clear attempts to change community narratives or sentiment regarding certain topics or brands, etc.

Digg, Reddit, and more have proven: a truly public discussion board will be taken over by business behavior unless it is strictly prohibited and enforced.

A decent number of people saw the writing on the wall that they didn't own the spaces that they socialized in, and sought something more distributed, with the Fediverse. It's a step in the right direction, but the extant focus on re-posting and updoots/downdoots still retains a lot of bullshit from social media that'll carry over just fine in terms of social behavior.

Reddit burned me out on any sort of website that has scoring or other perverse incentives to mess up the intent of whatever community. Groups who are earnest and savvy will host forum software and not social media software. Though one socializes on a forum, the way that you do so and the mechanics available separate them and allow you to focus on the topicality instead of how many updoots one gets. That design decision prevents gaming the forum, and in doing so gets rid of 'fake' engagement. For instance, why do we allow up and down votes without corresponding messages/reasons? I care much less about the metrics of group sentiment and would rather see why they feel a certain way.

Take a moment to actually read a Reddit thread, or a Youtube comments page, or any other generally accessible place to chat. Most of it is trash, a lot of it repeats itself, a lot of bots, misinformation, the works.

The media itself is fake. The things that get posted on places are meant to be posted places. It's all a fake social game. At least StumbleUpon, in its early hey day, exposed me to new and fun places on the Web. That atmosphere is dead in modern social media.

Bird's eye view, not much has changed. But Reddit has removed their awards system and Premium doesn't seem to have value. The bot problem hasn't gotten any better; rate-limiting just means they need more accounts. I visit there sometimes out of old habit, but I don't find anything fun anymore.

Lemmy has potential but I feel it's basically the same norms we saw on Reddit, depending on the instance.

Sure I'm on HN and it might barely qualify as social media, but I don't exactly fit in here. This is sort of a "last earnest effort" to participate somewhere on the Internet that isn't my own self-hosted services that use open or federated protocols.

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

I stopped using Reddit. That was the impact to me.

Well the esp32 subreddit took a dive. The other subs I care about were pretty stoic and unaffected, basically, "duh, we are on their site." Some attempted half-hearted departures but the only successful separation I've seen is TheMotte, an offshoot of the slate star codex sub.

Reddit knew they could wait out the blacked out sub mods, or actively force them to either resume or be replaced... and Reddit were right. It's back to business as usual, minus 3rd party apps (goodbye one-time-payment version of Narwhal, I miss you) and perhaps marginally worse content.

Reddit has always had its issues, but the spam and bullshit content has gotten so much worse in the past six months. It's a cesspool unless you go to hobby or municipal subs.

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.

It was complete submission lmao

Nothing. As the CEO predicted it fizzled out. The 3rd party apps died or asked for ridiculous amounts just to use the app. My Reddit usage dropped significantly but I guess I am not their target anymore. As any drama starts and ends on Reddit, this will be forgotten very soon.

I switched to Lemmy as a result of third party apps being killed.

I signed out of reddit during it, wont ever sign back in or click a link ever again. But then again, Ive abandoned the consumer web at this point, with hacker news barely holding on as the last vestige of a dead era... I'll say, there was some real kicking and thrashing this year as the high water mark became visible.

I'm generally still logged-in. But I don't have any subscribed subreddits. What I have instead is about half a dozen bookmarks in my browser. So I don't have a personal front page showing my subscribed subreddits. Only if I activate a browser bookmark will I see any reddit posts, and even then I only see the particular subreddit that the browser bookmark supplies.

Those daily hours I used to spend on Reddit are now practically non-existent.

Lemmy got some temporary traction. Torn whether it will continue

Overall, everything has gone back to normal. A vocal minority was convinced that Reddit was going to Digg itself but they didn't know that Reddit's audience is vastly different than it was 10 years ago. The nerds were outnumbered, and it shows.

People with unwavering ethical principles left.

That's been the only outcome.

Im seeing a LOT of "reddit won" here... But don't forget: Reddit faked hundreds of accounts when they started. They would have no issue in using whatever chatbots and LLMs to fake engagement now.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t...

I honestly think this was a finishing blow to reddit, which had already started declining in ~2019 due to TikTok and (anecdotally) an aggressive user acquisition strategy that had led to a big decline in content/discussion quality. Or even earlier, as mobile users replaced desktop and so things like long-form replies with links died off.

The biggest problem from the blackout and API drama isn't that some clients had to shut down. It's that, as a new user or a user that only uses the platform a little, it's much harder to discover good content organically now that most subreddits are NSFW or not on the /r/all feed. Even as someone who used reddit way more than any human ever should, I find the site a lot harder to use because I have to expend a lot more effort manually curating my subreddits when previously I could exhaust my personal feed and then just switch to /r/all - and I don't think I could ever discover some niche or zany community I didn't know about beforehand since I'd have to know to look for it to find it.

Since I doubt I'm alone in this, I think it's the beginning of the end for Reddit. It'll be a lot harder for new communities to form, existing small/medium/focused communities will struggle to gain members, and new users will probably think the site is empty and leave.

End result was: mastodon networks got a huge amount of bored redditors.

Lots of communities died: they "moved" to other platforms but didn't meaningfully survive the move. Reddit's conduct didn't change.

Biggest outcome: I'm no longer surprised when Web-searching a problem, getting to a Reddit post that might have the answer, and... the top-voted comment on that post has been deleted (or replaced with some text about protesting Reddit policy changes).

The outcome as far as I can see was that every subreddit posts impotent "protest" messages at the top of every thread with AutoModerator, like a new kind of cookie banner you have to ignore. It's pretty lame.

We'll know in nine months.

Moderation / admin quality going ever worse.

Recently fought for my alt account and a subreddit that was an automated, arguably better of another popular subreddit with basically the same content but without as much editorialization. Had to appeal like 10 times, and a few days after that, the account got re-banned on a faux "ban evasion" charge. Sigh.

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.

I have never used Reddit on my phone, so for me the whole loss-of-Apollo concern was a non-issue. I do see less quality posts now, but it's not dead.

I quit Reddit entirely. Lemmy is much better.

Alternatives have grown tremendously, although none have really reached the critical mass yet.

Personally, I have moved to Lemmy, and I use Tildes, too.

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...

Reddit screwed up in a different way.

They’ve shown they run the subs, make hire/fire decisions and have the power to supersede community manager calls.

This makes mods look more like labour, not volunteers.

As a user, I have noticed zero change. I didn't expect to.

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.

Wanted to plug this alternative that was developed as a result. I have no association with this, just a fan of the design (the whole thing, not just the visual design):

https://limereader.com/

I haven't posted much there (at all) in awhile so I'm guilty as anyone but am not sure why. I think a chicken-and-egg thing?

My sense is the quality of posts on smaller subreddits I frequent declined perceptibly but not dramatically after the blackout. In a lot of the subreddits it seems like the diversity of topics went down and the posts got a little more superficial or something.

I personally started frequenting old-fashioned forums more often again for certain topics.

Some things are hard to beat the subreddits though, and I've noticed they have slowly started returning to their prior quality (in a qualitative, not value sense). It seems like a lot of them that attempted to migrate to other places (lemmy, kbin, etc) never quite reproduced the subreddits, although I've been surprised at the staying power of some.

I guess I'm only using Reddit on a desktop/laptop. No way I'm using Reddit's official app since the rest died out.

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.

The geo-local community subreddit that I left has been overwhelmed by the local sheriff who likes to post about who they are firing, why won't anyone apply to work there, why criminals have no rights, and why that department's regressive tax plans won't even be noticed by anyone with enough money that matters.

That has turned the flavor of that sub into a simulacrum of Nextdoor.

I have stopped visiting the site myself -- taking the opportunity to try and de-addict myself and recover some mental space and time. Working very well so far. Can't say I am missing anything in life.

There were only one or two occasions since then where I clicked on a reddit link when the context/topic was very compelling. Happy to report I did not feel the urge to browse away and bury myself in other reddit links and subreddits.

On desktop I have a uMatrix/uBO rule that blocks the domain completely. So inadvertent clicks before seeing the domain also get trapped.

Nothing changed for me.

Absolutely nothing. 0 changes on reddit side, and mods fell back in line when threatened with removal of mod privileges and forcefully opening the subreddits.

I stopped using it when they updated the rules a few years ago with bizarre things like:

Racism or discrimination is never acceptable (unless against white people)

I've noticed there's a lot less activity in niche subreddits, but I felt like Reddit was in decline before the blackouts. It generally feels like Internet communities have become less interesting, or at least that's the case with the ones I'm exposed to.

I've heard it theorized that the API change screened out a lot of bots that had been driving conversation/voting. This is borne out by, say, /r/europe, which has taken an abrupt, substantial turn away from its traditional mantra of "more 'refugees', please".

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.

I left the platform completely. So that's at least n=1?

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.

For some reason, my copy of the app "Offline Reader For Reddit" still works, and I have no idea why.

I still mindlessly scroll sometimes on a third-party app with a personal API key (crappy habit, I know) but there's definitely some interesting subreddits that got popular on the (not signed in) frontpage when the cutover happened. r/amiugly, r/amiuglybrutallyhonest, r/presidents, r/howtolooksmax, r/whatifalthist (this is an odd political subreddit), two more r/amitheasshole themed subreddits popped up, and some others that I'm forgetting.

Definitely worse before the API changes, feels like there's less content now. I don't have to scroll very far to find niche subreddits anymore, which is a plus I suppose.