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As Reddit Crushes Protests, Its User Traffic Returns to Normal (www.pcmag.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.ml
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[–] 67 points 3 years ago (4 children)

Am I the only one who thinks that having only a 7% dip in visits and a 16% reduction in time spent on site is really unusual when over 99% of the site was dark for 48 hours? To me, that suggests that something fucky is going on with the count of real users vs bots on the site.

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  • [–] 28 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/72348

    Based on the numbers in this post it's fair to assume reddit is 90% bots.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I think I see the problem. 99% of the site wasn't dark. That reddark site was showing a hand curated list of subs that announced they were going dark, compared to the number of those subs that did go dark. The exact numbers are impossible to track down, but reddit claims they have "100k+" active communities. Less than 10% of reddit actually went dark, conservatively speaking.

    Of course, all subs are not created equal, so just comparing sub numbers doesn't tell the whole story, but even anecdotally, my sub list was mostly intact during the blackout.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    If they only loose 10% of users or less. That can still be fatal. If they keep the 99% that's lurking but lose the 1% that creates the content. The lurkers will leave eventually. Just slightly delayed. And from what I've seen there's been a lot of content creation and activity here. And plenty of lurking as well. I think the reality is that we won't see the true impact on Reddit for another few months.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    I'll be real with you, both of those things are huge for a company as large as reddit. They will obsess over user features that increase attention by just one or two percent. So losing that much traffic is a red alert.

    They also will have tracking for number of posts and comments deleted, number of subscriptions lost, users banned, etc. All of those numbers will look awful.

    In fact, karma is a really good indicator of what they lose. If you take karma, divide by time since account creation, then you have an excellent measure of engagement with communities. They can see how much karma is being lost. That's why they're afraid.

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