Just in case anyone here was wondering how Reddit's numbers are looking these days...
Data and visuals from https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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1589 users here now
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Not sure I believe it. A drop off like this is absolute death spiral territory, and the exodus of users would be way more clear, as places like here would have exploded in new accounts. These people aren’t just going to go outside, so where are the commensurate rises in activity on other websites?
Well, I started just playing more my game backlog on Steam and finding other things to do that wasn't scrolling the interwebs most of the time. I come here, sure, but no where near as much as I did on reddit, and I don't comment here nearly as much as I did there either.
I quit reddit when they started charging for API. I started engaging with my local library. I'm 35 years old and started reading my local newspaper for the first time ever in my life.
I came back to Reddit only to discover lemmy and now I read both my local news and lemmy.
It's been nice. Calmer, less stressful. It feels good again and I realize now that I've been very unhappy with reddit for many years now.
I actually did stop engaging as much after eliminating Reddit. Lemmy is nice sometimes, but I'm nowhere near as active. I probably post a few more YouTube comments, that's about it.
Yeah same here. I used to comment on reddit multiple times a day, I comment on Lemmy maybe once or twice a week. There's just not as much here that inspires me. It's okay, though, and I'm reading more books.
It’s certainly a bit thick on the memes, but it’ll flesh out as it matures.
I think we can agree the alternatives we’ve found have been much more positive overall.
So many more books : )
Yeah great innit? I always used to be a reader and I've been rediscovering old favourites and reading a bit of new stuff. I have limited screen time after work and life etc but I've also been doing the same with films. And there's a load of games on my list too. I'm not saying reddit was a waste of time, but I'd spend an hour or two a day on there, was constantly in ongoing conversations with a bunch of people. Lemmy is much less so. Social media is good n stuff, I'm gonna stick with Lemmy for a bit - but yeah, books etc :)
Same. I check Lemmy once or twice a day and comment less than on Reddit by far. I still feel more satisfied than I ever did on Reddit and I enjoy the community much more.
Something like 80% of reddit users don't interact at all and like 80% don't comment. So a tiny portion of reddit users actually generate comments.
Comments don't tend to be linear, more comments drive more people to engage which means more comments, so it forms a near exponential curve
Other websites HAVE seen and explosion in activity. Look at a similar graph for lemmy and you'll see a huge rise. Maybe not 1 to 1, but enough that if you extrapolate the same to other websites you can account for all the missing users.
Yeah that kind of a drop looks more to me like a change in reporting
They did change the API right around then, which is how this data would get pulled.
It could also be a very good explanation. Too bad that this site doesn't document its methodology and that reddit will never confirm such numbers.
However I am still certain that quality has dropped overall on most subreddits. An acceleration of what started a while ago.
a) a lot of accounts are bots, and depending on how they are implemented, a LOT of these have remained (or even were created) after the API changes - remember, it's easy to spin up 1000s of these to each provide small traffic so as to not run up against the API limits. Overall, I suspect a ton more bots are there now, b/c the bot defense effort was suspended, b/c unlike a single bot, that one needs to look at ALL traffic (I suppose it could be re-written from scratch in a decentralized manner but... the developers did not choose to do that).
b) a lot of people who remain on Reddit, including myself, offer it WAY less traffic than before. I used to be a mod of a small sub, which I quit, so I went from checking it almost literally hourly, so at most once a day, and most days I do not even comment at all. Also, I used to browse r/all (actually, "popular"), but now I never do, instead preferring Lemmy/Kbin for that. My personal traffic dropped off a cliff just like this image shows, in fact probably a lot more so. Although I still do visit that small gaming sub, b/c while there is a version of it here, instead of like 5 posts a day we get at most 1 per week, which less than a handful interact with. So that is not an "exodus of users" so much as a (vast) reduction of interaction, which still impacts their advertising revenue and thus the continuity of Reddit as a corporate entity.
c) as people are saying, not everyone came to Lemmy/Kbin. Some went to Mastodon, others just stopped going online as much, and like myself I comment now a lot less than I used to, though I read just as much (here, not there). So just b/c the traffic did not come "here", does not mean that it did not leave "there". i.e., think of the shock of the event as making people regress more to lurking and not feel as comfortable interacting, especially given the lack of ability of smaller magazines (what are those called on Lemmy again?) here. Thus, even if they did not "go outside", they still may not be interacting on Reddit.
People asking this often forget that spending less time online is an option as well. I would say I was pretty addicted to reddit doomscrolling between 3 and 8 hours per day. I exclusively use Lemmy now and doomscrolling just does not work here, so I spend 30-60 min per day here and have much more time to read books now, something I wanted to pursue more for a long time.
Me too:-)
Edit: well, okay so not 3-8 hours every day, but it still was better to cut back.:-)
The whales stopped posting, since those were most affected by the API ban.
The rest of the users are still there, but the content is just limited now.
I don't think all of those people just up and stopped using Reddit. My guess is a lot of them stopped engaging or even logging in and just lurk these days.