this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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I’ll be very curious to see the stats start rolling in regarding any decrease in Reddit’s views, etc. since July 1. I’m still using it, but only about half as much as I did with Apollo.
I doubt we will see any big dent in numbers so soon, if at all. The brutal honest truth is that most users of Reddit are casual lurkers who just want a content feed and do not care about anything else. This is why subreddits protested as they did, interrupting the content feed with blackouts and extremely niche rules.
What may actually happen is that a lot of the content creators leave, which will decrease the quality of the site in the long term and maybe push out the casual user when the content gets bad enough. This is not something easily quantifiable, so we'll just have to wait and see.
But personally, I'm ok even if reddit isn't toppled. Now that I've stopped using it, I have no stake in the matter anymore.
Yeah. In the beginning I'm rooting for the death of reddit but now that I've weaned myself off of it I just don't give a shit any more. They can rake in billions, or they can crumble tomorrow. I'm elsewhere and I feel fine.
Im a casual reddit lurker. I left because the official reddit app is horrible to browse even casually
See, but the fact you actually committed to leaving means there's a lot more people even more casual than you still on reddit.
The fact that you used a 3rd party app and just commented on a thread means you are not as casual as the average Reddit consumer.
lol the official app came to be long after 3rd party apps existed. The official app itself was a 3rd party app that Reddit purchased (though nothing good remains)
Yeah, in the beginning of the debacle many people commented that they didn’t even know that there were third party clients.
If, you are correct that..
And, a lot of the content creators and content moderators leave, decreasing the quality of the content on reddit.
Then, these lurkers will leave the platform.
I don't see why these folks would stay on reddit if the content decreases in quality. Especially, if we are assuming these lurkers do nothing to contribute to the content they are consuming.
It's interesting, you actually provided great evidence which counters your original claim that reddit will not be affected by all of this bad publicity.
The point of contention which is why I believe as above is that the standards of most people still on reddit are fairly low. Reddit has been going downhill for years, this much is known; it's only now, with this latest screw up, that I, (assumedly) you, and many others have decided to jump ship. I, personally, willfully ignored much of the enshittification of reddit, content that I could use third party tools and apps to make up for it's deficiencies; now that reddit is showing they don't care about us and are tearing down those tools, I'm gone.
But for many others, they don't care about any of the current goings on. Many do not even understand how the site actually works, confusing mods with admins as the same thing and not even getting that a sub could shut down (I was a mod, and saw many pieces of mod mail that amounted to "why can't I see posts here help"). Their standards for how bad things can get until they'll make a change in their browsing habits are surprisingly resilient.
I hope reddit adopts twitters new rate limiting and stars making people log in to view content that will really drive traffic away and make searches for blank reddit searches dissappear from Google and hopefully be replaced by blank lemmy start showing up in Google
I deleted my account, I still browse on desktop but I won’t interact.
I’m glad RES lets you block subreddits even if logged out, because there’s some real shitholes which appear if you aren’t logged in
I’m only using Reddit on Safari now that Apollo is gone and, even then, my use has been minimal since the blackout last month.
It will be slow, but Reddit’s death will be fine for me. I will definitely miss the smaller, niche communities, but I think they’ll all find a way to carry on either through Lemmy, et al, or whatever rises from there.
Reddit’s decisions, from investing in NFTs to letting go of Victoria way back when, have all been contributing to the inevitable, but when the content providers leave - and they are - the site will just collapse. My schadenfreude lies in Reddit never even realizing its IPO after all this drama.
I don’t really care if Reddit dies as long as we keep getting good content here on the fediverse. So far I have been totally surprised exactly how good this place has been as far as activity goes. I will miss the niche communities on Reddit so if we can siphon a bit more growth off this is excellent but the various Lemmy servers have enough activity to replace Reddit for general content for me
you can see the posts/comments per day on this site:
https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/
there was definitely a dip, but there seems to always be a dip on weekends and with it being a holiday in the US it is hard to say how much that is affecting usage
Wednesday should be the first 'normal' day since July 1st so I'll be interested to see how much it recovers
I’m much more curious about interactions/engagement than views. How many posts and comments compared to before the API changes?
It does have a post/comment volume chart, but I don't know how reliable that data is. On July 1st, the API change affected both users (resulting in some leaving which should reduce those metrics) as well as mods (resulting in a reduced ability to deal with bots and trolls, which should increase those metrics).
Add in the complication that Reddit's admins now have a short vs long term conflict where the short term is helped by making it seem like the API changes haven't hurt anything and allowing bots to inflate numbers (or even run them themselves) while the long term would want to see bot activity stamped out so that more users aren't driven away by it.
I don't think we'll get a good idea of what's going on in the short term. In the long term, it might require tools to scrape the data without the API being available (which will definitely happen, you can't allow users to access something and prevent programs from accessing it because the browser itself is a program and HTML, which makes it possible for browsers to organize the information they display, also makes it easier to parse and separate data).
I only use it when I'm on desktop. Their mobile app isn't bad in my opinion, but I just refuse to give them my data.