Just in case anyone here was wondering how Reddit's numbers are looking these days...
Data and visuals from https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit
Did the actual comments fall or did the tool get hit by the API change?
That depends on how it's written. The fact that it's not showing zero completely makes me think they'd been iterating over threads counting comments, and they're hitting API limits. But that's just a blind guess without having looked at their source code.
If that were the case, itd be a pretty sharp ceiling not a noisy one
If they’re only able to get the comment counts for a smaller number of threads, those individual numbers would be noisy but lower.
For example, before they got 100 threads with counts ranging from 0-100. Now they only get 10 threads with the same range of counts.
There is a big fat warning at the top of the page saying that the data is out of date, or innacurate due to the api changes
Funny enough, if it is an API problem, then this is one of the scenarios that a scrapper could easily solve the issue and grant accurate results again. A playwright script written by ChatGTP could do it.
I read reddit with a client that uses a scrapper now. The fuck is reddit gonna do, block Chromium? They said they wanted to stop this, well, congrats, they started it instead.
ReVanced can patch most of the popular apps with your own private (free to use) API key.
Step by step guide if you're interested
I'm sure Reddit is seeing private key usage sky rocketing on their end since ReVanced released these patches. Whether or not Reddit chooses to do anything about it remains to be seen, but I can't help but wonder how long it will last.
Nowadays I still stick with Lemmy for general scrolling and only go to Reddit for my niche subreddits that don't have active equivalents here.
Yes, a big factor, many users gradually left the site after the API changed. Also the sub mods have become increasingly ban-happy in the recent years.
I find it very interesting that this is reportedly one of the top subs on all of Reddit: "Comments Per Day" ranks it #1, by Subscribers or Posts Per Day it is #2, Growth (Day) and Growth (Month) are both #5, Growth (Month) and Growth (Year) are both #4, etc.
Not only that, it is by far the top sub by this "Comments Per Day" metric: it shows 15828 Comments reported in a recent 24-hr period of time, whereas the next highest sub is r/worldnews with a mere 5153 Comments Per Day, then r/AmItheAsshole and r/nfl also ~5k, then others rapidly falling further like r/NoStupidQuestions and r/AITAH each ~3k, etc.
To reiterate: this is the #1 sub over all of Reddit, with >3x more comments per day than any other sub, and like more comments than the next 3 subs all combined... and it still has fallen off a cliff, even by this same exact metric.
I do not know how reliable subredditstats.com is overall, but even if it were not so good lately, so long as all the stats are more or less evenly biased across all the subs, we should still be able to learn something from these comparisons? (please add a correction if you know of some evidence that this is not true) One caveat is that it might be harder to compare now vs. pre-API changes? But if it can be believed, the numbers fell from a peak of >100k in June 2023, to a more average ~75k, then dropped like a rock in July to ~15k and has remained hovering around that area ever since...
I do not visit popular subs on Reddit anymore, just one that has refused to migrate to Lemmy/Kbin, but this sounds entirely believable to me. If you click the links to the top posts, the very title titles of the posts and top comments to them also showcase the change: like the #2 top post to that sub is "Now that Reddit are killing 3rd party apps on July 1st what are great alternatives to Reddit?" w/ 78.1k upvotes, and has the top comment w/ 5.2k upvotes of "I might get back into reading books after over a decade." (and other comments likewise, pointing to Reddit alternatives, and angry exclamations about the 3rd party apps going away)
In short, THIS seems to be the evidence that we have been waiting for all this time, about just how far Reddit has fallen / died off?
Although comments on Lemmy/Kbin I do not think have risen by +~50k or so per day, so I wonder where all that Reddit traffic went? Possibly as the aforementioned comment said, it went offline, basically nowhere.
Edit: I nominated this post to m/BestOf.
Possibly as the aforementioned comment said, it went offline, basically nowhere.
Probably depends on the audience. Discord for some, a bit of Lemmy, people maybe went back to old school forums too.
Yes exactly, much of the people who left leddit have scattered across a multitude of social media / content aggregators.
tiktok/insta/lemmy/kbin/bluesky/etc. there are so many, it blows my mind when people say "why then has lemmy not exploded?" without recognizing there are many many lemmy instances and many many MORE alternatives. It's not just a reddit or lemmy decision lol
Not that I don't appreciate the cynicism, but by killing the api, could be a major dropoff in bot accounts.
this is not an opinion that should be shared by anyone who has opened a frontpage comment section in the last 3 months. bot spam has only gotten significantly worse since july.
the API changes had no effect on bot accounts, anyway. reddit corp specifically made an exception for them and other "low volume" API users - which is why you can still use your own API key to activate defunct 3rd party apps.
(yes, the implication is that normal users can go to hell if they don't want to use the app - but by imitating a bot, reddit gives you preferential treatment. they want bots juicing their activity metrics.)
my guess is that subredditstats.com is itself impacted by the API changes, or this is a consequence of frontpage posts cycling MUCH more slowly than they did before the protests. fewer individual posts reaching r/all means less traffic and fewer comments as a result.
they want bots juicing their activity metrics
Seems like it would have been easier to just not destroy third party apps given that their traffic numbers have apparently collapsed because of that.
yes it's always easier to NOT fuck up a fully functional product and drive your userbase off a cliff, but that's not good enough for the huge IPO that huffman is courting. he wants to be able to say "look, we're monetizing 80% more MAUs than before and earning 45% more per person".
frankly i doubt they'll be able to go public at all at this rate. if i were the Newhouses (reddit's owners through Advance Publications) i would certainly be looking for someone to unload this hot potato onto.
The satisfaction of seeing this is hard to describe. Internet 1 : 0 Reddit
I do visit Reddit on occasion (with Adblock) but I haven’t made one comment or one post since I lost Apollo. Why? I deleted all history then deleted the accounts. I can’t even upvote and that’s my little protest still in full swing.
Same. It's unavoidable to use it when it turns up in Google searches or for niche content, but I've 100% stopped contributing.
The corporate world undervalues goodwill, both from their customers and their employees.
I was commenting regularly. Now I comment here, sorry y'all.
I think that's what has surprised me the most. When I moved here after the API shutdown, things seemed pretty slow. But now it seems activity is really picking up. I would be very interested to see the fediverse growth rate vs. Reddit's when it first started. I'm just surprised to see how quickly things are changing here.
I loved Reddit, until executives took a nosedive and their admins screwed my account over with a blatantly false suspension.
Swartz would be appalled at what Huffman has done.
i got perma banned once for.... absolutely no reason. it got appealed when i asked why i was perma banned in my appeal
I clicked on an AskReddit link in google earlier today and wow the posts that receive engagement there now... From the little I've seen since leaving, reddit in general has dropped off a fuckin cliff in regards to content quality
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.
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.
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.
Reddit's content has taken an absolute nose dive, I still lurk, but every time I think about posting, I close out the tab and leave now. The site has also become an ad filled dumpster fire.
To me it also feels like the ratio of low effort content posts or reposts VS original content has changed considerably. At least when browsing /r/all.
And it's not just r/askreddit all subreddits I tried show a similar drop, including the ones that still seem relatively active.
I figured the highest engagement users would leave because they'd care the most about the api changes but wow, I checked a few subs and they all had harsh engagement drops just like askreddit.
Wow I didn't know it dropped off a cliff like that in July
Has the community changed much during that time?
Yes. Drastically. It is almost as big of a difference as when Reddit flipped, overnight, from pro Bernie to pro Clinton in the 2016 election.
Comments and post quality took a nose dive. And I don’t mean the typical summer change, I mean drastic and significant change.
You mean the API changes that stopped the only source of these statistics from collecting them stopped effectively collecting them?
What the hell happened in the second half of 2020?
George Floyd was murdered on May 25. COVID was ravaging the world. The presidential election cycle was in full swing. And I'm sure much more.
Anna I'm sure much more.
Hello fellow Gboard user. I would have also noticed "abs" in place of "and".
Does that mean askreddit is good again?
Do you do the sex? What's the saddest song ever? What's the sexiest sex ever? Sad song? Sex?
Nope. It just means there are bots left chatting amongst themselves ;)
This is most pleasing
what happened in the 3rd quarter of 2020? from 0 to 200k comments, and then down again.
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