this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Reddit’s average daily traffic fell during blackout, according to third-party data | Engadget (www.engadget.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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On the day before the Reddit blackout began on June 12th, Similarweb logged more than 57 million daily visits to the platform.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Steve Huffman went on a media offensive where he attempted to cast aggrieved users and moderators, many of whom give countless hours of their free time to make Reddit the vibrant platform it is today, as unreasonable. “These people who are mad, they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free,”

Oh the fucking irony of the guy whose site can't survive without millions of free hours from dedicated mod teams, who spend their entire duration criticised (sometimes tightly, sometimes wrongly,) shit on, harassed, and often doxxed and threatened by the user base

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My time as a Reddit mod left me with no desire to do it elsewhere and I'd modded other forums prior to Reddit. I stepped down about 5 years ago and while I won't say I'll never do it again, I'm exhausted just recalling my experience and that's enough to put me off.

There are communities I'd love to have and see here on kbin but the mere thought of the time and effort has me taking a hard pass.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I modded 2 niche communities, and it was a relief to leave and resign. I haven't felt so free to express a real opinion in a long time. Even alts aren't safe because you have an chair linguists.

Mods of bigger subs, good and bad do a job I wouldn't ever want

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I'm not sure where it ranked at the time but I remember when one of the subs hit 100k (this was circa 2014) and by the time I left we were close to 500k. When I checked before the blackout they were sitting at 1.9m.

You're absolutely right about an alt not doing much, if you ever had time for that. Modding definitely affected my Reddit experience, even after stepping down, and combined with how it changed over the last several years, my participation went way down, maybe a handful of comments a month at best, and I lurked and upvoted/downvoted for the most part. I'm slowly shaking off those cobwebs in this exciting new space!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Those 5 million users didn't seem to come here? We still have improvements to make a layman resume their reddit activity here. This just seems like a loss of the community overall.

But if the same percentage of people come over we are looking at roughly a 10x growth, at a minimum.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The lemmy devs put up a note yesterday. Said maybe 24X, or something close to that. You can see the stats at https://the-federation.info/platform/73. Probably kbin similar. Glad you guys are re-federated now.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

fedidb.org for Kbin + Lemmy stats. 4x growth in ~2 weeks is insane!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I'm not going to cry if there are a lot less people here. Half the real people sound like bots on Reddit and the quality of discussions has hit bottom. No loss whatsoever if that isn't replicated.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I imagine it'll take time to see the full migration. Many users might wait before making an account or even just not be sure which instance they want their account on right away.

I personally took a few days to decide whether I would move or just stop using Reddit like platforms. And after that it took a day or so to decide on my instance and then start actually using a new platform.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I had wondered about this. I figured that all of these surveillance capitalist adtech/analytics companies would have to have some metrics on this.

What would be really nice to know is how the numbers look now that the blackout has been over for a while. A 6.6% drop is pretty tiny if it only lasted a day or two.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Keep in mind too that is traffic. Social sites like 90% of the users are drive by, like 10% are significant contributors, and 1% are the big contributors. Contribution is not high traffic but it is what makes the site go. You kind of know this be cause they said the average visit to Reddit is like 7 minutes. These are not contributors.

So reddit may have 430 million active users, but 43 million contributors, and 4.3 million big contributors. They just pissed of the 4.3 million that contribute the majority of the content. Maybe some of the 43 million.

On the other hand presumably Reddit revenue is all about views. So from their view end, that has not changed much.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

No one likes a 6% loss. Not in revenue and not regarding ad effectiveness either. Although I'm guessing a lot of the people here are part of the adblocking crowd.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Other thing to remember is some browsers.especially google chrome will preload you most visited websites when you open a new tab this will generate traffic hits even if you don't go there.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Glad it is doing that.