this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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‘Front page of the internet’: how social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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‘Front page of the internet’: how social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit::A mass user protest six months ago over technical tweaks had big downstream effects, and now the ‘front page of the internet’ is changed for ever

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Wow, this stats website is interesting. I checked a number of subs I used to frequent: r/thenetherlands, r/idiotsincars and r/Europe . All of them see meteoric rice in subscribers, but number of posts goes down significantly since 2020-2021 (r/idiotisincars is the outlier here, you can clearly see the pandemic, but once it resumes the trend is downward again).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I just checked a couple old subs I used to visit. And the stats are very dramatic in the drop of actual content. So i tried to actually go to reddit to check. Something I haven't done since opening my Lemmy account 7 moths ago. Somewhat surprisingly to me the stats actually seemed to reflect reality. One of the subs hadn't had any activity for 5 months!! And it used to be reasonably active for a niche sub, with new content every day.

I also tried to look at the most popular non controversial sub I could think of. Which is r/funny by subscribers, and indeed it's ranked #1 since 2019, and that too had a dramatic drop in activity. https://subredditstats.com/r/funny
From these stats, it really seems like reddit is dying, it's going about as bad as some of the worst plausible predictions 7 months ago!
The most notable thing IMO is that content doesn't seem to be picking up again, but rather the decline continues.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Take those stats with a huge pinch of salt

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 This data is likely out of date or inaccurate now that Reddit has decided to kill the open ecosystem that existed around Reddit.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

You're trying to measure the effect of something that affected your measurement system.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Even if you ignore the latter half of 2023 there is a huge and consistent decline in number of posts per day.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Thanks, I wasn't sure where the data came from, but I tried to check up on a few subs, and they were definitely not doing well.