Excerpt:
Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.
I migrated entirely to Lemmy and I don’t regret it. I do miss the amount of content on Reddit, but at least I know I’m not supporting them anymore.
14 year redditor and I go back and forth (only for 2 subreddits) but majority of reddit, including the news portions are completely dead. RIP r/pbsnews. I vow not to comment or submit any new links for them.
Same. I will say though, my phone usage overall has gone wayyyyy down. So. Thanks, Reddit?
Because the most active contributing users left. I used to comment a lot on reddit, but I’ve been exclusively on Lemmy since my 3rd party app was axed.
And I’ve been very active here. Like, even on this alt account that I made 16 days ago, my app says my post “karma” is already higher than my reddit comment karma was from over a decade.
I feel more willing to contribute because there’s a sense of community, and I’m not just providing free entertainment for a company to profit off of.
Between you and @RandalThor must cover 50% of stuff I see
I’ve been having fun doing it. I just post a few memes throughout the day whenever I think about it, and I also try to spread it out among some smaller communities that I want to help grow.
So, memes and a handful of communities that I’m personally interested in.
I feel like I see you a lot, too. I don’t remember where, but it’s probably because I always notice the great username :)
There are five lights.
Awwww :)
There’s another Rand? I must meet this man over at Wheeloftime!
I win again, Lews Therin.
Hell yeah another place to subscribe to!! Thanks for linking it
I used to comment a lot on reddit
Same. I had a 15 year account with a couple hundred thousand karma and commented and posted a lot. If you piss off the people who actually use the site you will reap what you sow. Reddit should have known that since the exact scenario happened fir Digg when everyone migrated to reddit.
They looked at the leaves, and failed to see the forest, thinking that simply not killing old.reddit was enough to avoid Digg-ing the grave. Because from their view that’s how Digg died - v4 happened, users couldn’t go back, they got pissy, and they left.
@megane_kun@lemm.ee is also right when he says that they compared Reddit with other social media platforms and took the wrong conclusions. What keeps people in Facebook aren’t “content creators” or what have you, but their relatives and friends; in Reddit there’s no such thing, people weren’t there because of more people but because of the content that those people created, so their connection with the platform is considerably weaker.
I also think that the trust thermocline played a role. It wasn’t the first time that the platform pissed its own users.
I’ve commented more on lemmy in 3 months than the last 10 years on Reddit
Shit. I think it took me 5 years on reddit to comment once. Now I have alts! Alts!
I had over 300k comment karma, on the site every single day for about 10 years. Comparing the comments here vs there it’s crazy I hung around so long. It’s like getting out of an abusive relationship, you don’t realize how much you’re being mistreated until you’re out from under them.
Same. Thing is, I would usually get gold like once or twice a month. I would post well sourced, long and often highly upvoted comments. Try to be genuinely helpful or insightful. I used to be a journalist, it was an outlet for me.
Not that they were that great, redditers upvoting stuff doesn’t make a comment right or interesting, and wasting too much time there was really not something to be proud of, but if just ten thousand users like you and me quit reddit, that leaves mainly teenagers, bots and ‘comedians’ rehashing the same tired puns.
It can effectively kill smaller subreddits, as has quite obviously happened in some cases.
We weren’t just customers, we also produced a disproportionate amount of the content on reddit. More than our relatively small numbers would suggest. IRC the 1% rule states that only 1% of users actively post/comment. If you’re posting relatively coherent or thought out comments, you’re the 1% of that 1%.
You’re not alone. Just check https://subredditstats.com/r/technology or any other sub you used to visit and you’ll see a clear drop in comments/day. After the APIcalypse, so many people just left and never came back.
Wow, this is really interesting! I checked a few, and you can see a severe drop in activity.
Every sub I cheked got totally nuked to oblivion. No wonder why people are complaining about the quality. Hardly anyone is there to comment or vote.
I opened reddit on desktop yesterday for the first time in a while, and I had received a survey from the Admins.
I’ve never received something like that before. The questions made it seem like they’re trying to figure out why people are unhappy.
Sounds like an easy question. RIP RIF (and all the other apps), therefore Reddit is nolonger fun.
I never thought it would be so easy to stop going on Reddit, but this place is good enough
good enough
IMO the users here are way more pleasant to spend time with than those on Reddit. The level of hostility in some areas of Reddit was off the charts and it seems the trolls are staying put. This definitely /mademesmile.
I really avoided unpleasant subreddits. There were many smaller subreddits that were genuinely fun to be in. I miss those communities here. One that comes to mind is r/gintama. That sub was a great source of joy for me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find one here.
If you build it they will come…
Can you create your own?
Sadly there isn’t even a Christianity community on here :(
Also miss stupid stuff like waxsealing, heraldry, spicypillows
Be the change you want to see and create that community.
Yeah I’ve had some really good conversations here, I had a lot of great little friend groups on Reddit over the years but being here made me realise I haven’t had a really good chat with someone that I genuinely enjoy talking to on there for about five years. I’d honestly just assumed it was me but here I’ve had so many great conversations, I don’t know why but possibly it’s that the good interesting people aren’t drowned out and beaten down by a sea of hostility.
Still traces of the good ol’ toxic reddit spirit
Content creators left.
You lose those, you’re fucked. A full fckin 80-90% of any given user base are consumers / commenters and they follow content. Creators are a keystone species.
Yeah. Reddit seemed to view users like every other social media app without realizing that a lot of the successful apps compensate those who add value to the app.
The official app seems ok for consuming content, but it was dogshit for meaningful interaction.
I wanted to call bullshit
but they’re entirely right.* Comments per day took a nosedive. Now if only more hobby communities would lift off, I’d be able to abandon Reddit entirely. I’m up to my tits in Linux and privacy guides but I still know nothing of mushroom picking. Nothing!Edit: *some users pointed out that subredditstats is no longer capable of accurately tracking comment numbers. I was wrong.
How accurate is that site, though? I checked one sub and it seems to heavily undercount the number of threads and comments.
Hmm, you’re right. The site missed 75% of the comments on the subreddit I checked.
Yep.
Hopefully it always misses 75%, but that’s tough to check.
A large chunk of the core 1% contributor base dropped Reddit.
- I was behind migrating few of the biggest heavyweights, like datahoarder, piracy and so on.
- I also helped cause critical damage to Reddit by being the first official subreddit, privatelife, to have migrated to Lemmy many years ago, and to have voiced against spez and reddit’s CIA political agendas in plenty capacity.
- also have been probably the only subreddit to have closed it on Reddit and made Lemmy the only official place for it.
- I have also been one of the few core Lemmy builders during the past 3 years, doing almost everything other than software development.
My privacy community on Reddit had a staggering 12K users with an activity of 100-150 active users all the time. I sacrificed it, and about 1.3K of those moved to Lemmy. It was the only authentic privacy community on reddit, with none to replace it. r/privacy and r/privacyguides are full of bullshitters, donation stealers and harassers.
I for the first time saw a reddit alternative that was not run by right wing nutjobs or was not infested with rightwingers/freezepeachers/nazis/pedos, and had potential to make it the true reddit alternative close to what I imagined. Thanks to OG fellow comrades (you all know who you are), and thanks to the one who told me to go help Lemmy (you da goat), Lemmy is kind of what I wanted it to be. It has a good foundation.
Shortcoming of content other than memes and political bickering needs to be fixed. And people need to stop being consoomers and playing musical chairs with this problem. Try to put in some effort instead of making Lemmy yet another toilet scrolling app.
Do you think there is something inherent to the reddit-format that promotes toilet scrolling? I think so.
Flick through posts, open posts with one tap, get your dopamine. Reddit is also used more by introverted and nerdy people, as opposed to extroverts that use Instagram who would openly watch celebrity related stuff on feeds. Reddit has more user created while Instagram has more “manufactured” content.
I contribute a lot here (on different accounts) as an extrovert who just also happens to not care about celebrities. I used to be on Instagram because I care about my friends who use it, but the platform got enshittified enough to drive me off. Yes, maybe I won’t know that you went on vacation so I won’t be able to bring that up as a conversation topic, you’ll have to remember that yourself and bring it up in conversation. But that’s not exactly a great loss and neither is having one fewer person viewing your pictures and tapping “like” on it. A big part of my extroversion is that I like discussing things. Kbin and Lemmy are places to do that.
I toilet scroll these because it’s something short and engaging I can do instead of just doing nothing while waiting for the human waste disposal process to finish.
This is a decision to only let those stupid enough to pay for premium enjoy the site
Infinity stopped working too very recently so that i don’t even open my account in reddit
The completely unblockable hegetsus ads were really what made me switch to Apollo from the official Reddit app. Then killing third party apps made me leave for good. Bravo, Reddit
I totally forgot about hegetsus until now.
We were having a good day.
We were ALL having a good day.
They could have done so much. Force third party apps to use their ads or make a reddit premium subscription. Instead they decided to destroy all their free labor.
Those ads were pretty based tbh
I would probably still post on reddit if I could do it from my phone in an app that actually works instead of being a glorified ad platform. They killed 3rd party apps to bully users to switch to the official app to boost the usage stats to have a better angle to haggle for their IPO. Problem is that the official app is just excruciatingly painful to use if you are accustomed to a proper reddit browsing tool.
The backhanded, sneaky way they did it with all the denial and lies was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Instead of being upfront and calling a spade a spade, they commited to a hostile takeover and removed all doubt that reddit is going to stay a platform for the people.
If they would have been honest from the get-go I might have continued posting.
If you open Reddit without an account on a browser, it will automatically create a username for you when you are on site now. Hopped on to look at a post on a semi active subreddit and saw I was somehow logged in, but it was an auto generated account name. Wonder if they are trying to boost numbers that way as well
deleted by creator
Tbh I think the vast majority of people that use these sites are just there to mindlessly scroll. I do imagine a lot of their reactions to the protests was to be pissed at the weird basement dwellers disrupting their porn/aww/etc feeds
More than anything, the fact that Reddit absolutely quadruple-downed on steering people to their garbage app at the same time probably drove a lot of that crowd away. I regard it like
TwitterX now: just another rotting, closed-off corporate theme park - and I refuse to believe any content I hit a login wall after getting linked to is important enough to deal with their shit.be pissed at the weird basement dwellers disrupting their porn/aww/etc feeds
LOL - I think this is a very apt description. For every person that has left, there are a dozen more like this. Couldn’t care less that 4 of the 5 top posts are reposted tiktok videos.
Hey, at least the attention whoring subs are getting a lot of frontpage time XD
Like the “amiugly” and all its variants, which I didn’t even know existed until after the fiasco pushed them to get on the r/all frontpage.
Well, they did say that about only the 10% of users were the ones who make comments and engage with the communities, and guess what, that 10% did use more likely than not, the third party apps. I’ve been a redditor for more than 16 years with a lot of karma, I deleted all my accounts but one, the oldest I had. I’ve been back for a couple of niche communities but I haven’t commented nor upvoted anything.
Another factor that they probably didn’t consider is that those 10% were, on average, more informed about what was happening and what happened in the past (see spoiler for examples). So for a lot of those people in the 10%, even if they didn’t use the 3PAs (I predict that a lot of them were desktop users), it was the straw breaking the camel’s back - I bet that some people felt outright disgusted for contributing with the profits of a disgusting company like Reddit Inc.
List of examples:
- A Reddit admin defending a paedophile. People being banned left and right for highlighting this.
- The above showing that Reddit has tools to prevent harassment, but won’t use them to protect users.
- The whole “we’ll quarantine TD to shut protesters up, but we still want its posters to feel at home here, so we won’t ban the sub until it’s inactive”.
- Spoiling the “Reddit silver” joke for profit.
- Using Ellen Pao as a scapegoat.
- Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, it’s almost like Reddit Inc. says “Reddit users are those stupid things, of course if you throw any bullshit on their snouts they’ll happily swallow it”. Every fucking announcement smelled like bullshit, specially coming from that sociopath called Steve Huffman.
It’s only hard for me to keep up with sports discussion without reddit but whatever.
tha’ts what radio is for!
Sports radio is usually terrible though lol. Sports stuff is a legitimate hole here (compared to reddit), but I also have to imagine it’s much more resource intensive to host/moderate. Game threads routinely get thousands or tens of thousands of comments – it’s a bunch of people in there for three hours straight – and people yell at each other over sports all the time.
so how is random redditors talking sports better than sports radio?
If you want to know about or hear discussion around the game or something but are around other people without headphones, quietly reading what Redditors have to say is considered more polite than putting on the sports radio for everyone else to hear.
