I expect it’s a low percentage of overall users. Many are using the official Reddit app and just complaining about it. Others have switched to surviving third party apps. Still others are strictly Old Reddit on desktop.
The moderator community have likely felt a greater hit.
This is not public information, you won’t know anything about that until the next quarterly reports. That being said if you go to the front page right now it seems pretty much like business as usual.
To be fair, with a website as huge as reddit, a 25% or even 50% decrease in user activity probably won’t be that noticeable from someone like us. Instead of 2 million posts a day, it’s not now 1 million. Or instead of 500k, it’s 250k. None of those are knew we could feasibly differentiate.
Maybe if you sit on r/all and keep track of how fast new posts are moving, but even then, the algorithm may still just move the same number of posts up and down the main pages. So even then, it would be hard to tell if usage is down.
Now obviously there’s no way it’s down that much. It’s significantly lower. But I’m just saying even if we pretend that it was down that much, it would look like business as usual.
Also, either way, I’m still glad to find this place. It feels nicer and offers what I wanted in a way reddit couldn’t.
A saw a post a while back commenting on how many upvotes it was taking to get onto the front page of r/all having dropped, but not sure if there is any way to see stats from before API changes now.
One of the people on (I think) modcoord noted that for years reddit has allowed moderators to look at traffic stats for their subreddit. And that the traffic stats are no longer available; the last day they could access was … June 30.
Yeah you’re right that it wouldn’t be immediately noticeable but just because a few thousands of us jumped to Lemmy doesn’t mean there is any significant change on reddit. I checked on my most active communities and all the usual suspects are there, posting and commenting as usual. The amount of people that left reddit are probably a fraction of a percent.
The real question is how many power users and moderators left, the first are the ones that produce the most content, the second are the ones that prevent the place turning into a shithole. If an important fraction of those left, it WILL impact the site.
Precisely, the importance is if the mods stick around or not.
One sub I was in the Mod basically said a few weeks ago ‘I’ve had it with this, no offense guys but just run it how you want from now on’I’m retiring’. The users didn’t turn it into a protest sub but somehow it’s worse than that because it’s repetitive and boring.
So there’s a few old hands sticking around but I doubt there’ll be new people joining it. And I think that will be true for a lot of unmoderated subs, they won’t all get full of porn and spam, they’ll just become much less interesting
I didn’t fully quit reddit, but I’m going to Lemmy first and foremost and rarely go back to reddit for very specific communities. My reddit usage dropped by 90+% probably, but I’m not completely gone.
I’m sure the same is true for many other users as well, so simply counting the number of (active) users then and now won’t get even close to the actual loss in traffic and participation.
I haven’t gone back to Reddit yet, but I’m sure I will at sometime for, like you said, some of the smaller communities or something specific I may not be able to find here for now. I’ll stay here as much as I can though, I’m sure it will only improve.
I quit reddit on my phone, and I’m never looking back. I’m still browsing Reddit with RES on my PCs though. So a drastic reduction in use.
Reddit feels like different now compared to a week ago. Browsing a new fresh site opened my eyes to how shit r/all are. Even with blocked subreddits a new hate fueled subreddit emerges every week.
It’s going to be hard to tell definitively, because so much traffic on the major platforms like Reddit are bots. As a percentage of overall traffic, the reduction may only be a few percentage points.
But all that traffic that is leaving are from Actual Humans. Humans who cared enough about their interactions to have preferences about how they engaged with Reddit. In a few years, Reddit will just be a bunch of bots talking to each other.
One of the founders of Reddit mentioned in an interview a while back that it was all bots when it started, to give the illusion of being populated when it was too new to have any users except the people who worked on it. From bots it came, and to bots it will return. The circle of life.
Well seems simple enough. You look at how many new users Lemmy got and subtract that from whatever reddit numbers are online. Only posters/commenters count for Lemmy activity, and the number of lurkers is likely several times bigger. Anyway so based on what I see online, Lemmy has about 50k active users, maybe up to 10x more lurkers. So like half a million users maybe. Reddit probably has 55 million users. So that’s still 11x bigger than Lemmy
So if I’m even remotely in the ballpark, Lemmy managed to grab like 1% of the reddit userbase & the management won the mainstream crowd as usual. Of course Lemmy isn’t ready for the volume and legal costs anyway
50k very active users that try to have integrity is a pretty big deal. Because with that will come development of the platform, meanwhile Reddit is going to struggle with a new chapter of shitty moderation and decreased quality. There are also a lot of people burnt out on the issue and so I expect real numbers from the immediate to be more visible over the next month or two.
Plus, which instances are you looking at for those numbers? Are all the lemmy instances and kbin included in those numbers?
Let’s just assume that it’s going to be about 1% of reddit’s userbase. Does it matter which 1%? How will the platforms evolve? Because both are very different now than before, we’re seeing realtime changes across a lot of tech and the internet. A lot of faith was lost by the public in many platforms by the people at all paying attention, and a lot of hope was garnished by the successful move to new platforms.
Stuff is definitely changing. I’m curious what big tech is gonna do to try to restore faith, or if they’ll try to pretend nothing’s happened and try to sweep it under the rug. A lot of people already try to downplay the events into just numbers, but in reality, there are a LOT of eyes watching and waiting to see what happens. People are tired of the same old capitalist bullshit and want something better, it isn’t just ex/reddittors, it’s Twitter users, Linux users, Amazon users, Netflix users, students with debt, homeowners, and a LOT of young people. People want better and the messed up economic future is making people pay attention more than ever.
It very much does. The old metric was that 1% create, 10% comment, and the rest consume (I don’t think the metric included a number for moderator-types). I suspect most of the emigres have a heavier percentage of moderators, creators, and commenters. And I suspect it also contains a larger percentage of old-time redditors. While there are undoubtedly a bunch of people stepping into place on reddit right now, the loss of the people who left is going to hurt reddit.
That assumes people’s usage is all-or-nothing, though. I started using Lemmy and I now use reddit a lot less, but still use it for communities that don’t exist or aren’t active here. I don’t imagine I’m the only one in that boat.
I think it’s a good chunk but not enough to outright kill the site.
The shitshow that was Spez’s AMA certainly drove away a few users, but I think many more were hoping that they’d dial back the API changes at the eleventh hour to allow third-party apps to at least coexist.
No real way to tell, but I don’t think it would be immediately noticeable on Reddit. Like the satisfying “we killed reddit” probably isn’t going to happen. On the other hand, being here clearly have discoverd the Fediverse as replacement, so IMO it doesn’t matter what happens to Reddit now.
(Not to say the drama/any issues Reddit ends up with won’t be endlessly entertaining)
I definitely think getting interested in the fediverse is a long game. Think the death of Facebook. It was a slow burn between 2016 and 2020, involving lots of different communities moving at different times for different reasons
Exactly. Whether or not Facebook or Reddit or Netflix or Twitter survive, thrive, or perish is irrelevant to me.
What matters is that they won’t profit off my data, they won’t sell any ads from my activity, and they won’t get a penny more of subscription money out of me.
If others wish to continue diving down those rabbit holes, that’s on them.
Really? Feels like a graveyard when I log in. I mean everyone over 65 still uses it and there are a lot of weird holdouts but all my friends moved over to instagram, which is so much worse than facebook ever was IMO
The secret sauce though is that one out of every 3 reels is ragebait. just a different kind that you cant get away from because you’re so addicted to the scroll feature
Like the satisfying “we killed reddit” probably isn’t going to happen.
I used to think this until all of the recent blows they have had, such as the IAmA losses and Microsoft withdrawing their Minecraft support. With advertisers withdrawing and users leaving, I think they are going to have problems covering operating expenses in the near term that could lead to an implosion due to lack of funds.
Before all this started, Fidelity’s Reddit investment was devalued pretty heavily and they have had profitability issues. Tech companies in general are having investor problems due to interest rates so Reddit have problems is going to really scare away any risk-adverse investors. They have proven they cannot control their user base (which is good news for users) which scares advertisers away from content unfriendly to their interests. They just doubled their employees from like 1000 to 2000 in the past couple of years, which just adds astronomically to their operating expenses.
I think they make about $500 million in revenue and are still in the red. Even minor changes to this expense/income ratio can cause issues that make them suddenly insolvent with no one to bail them out.
Sadly we won’t know the amount of users Reddit lost with Reddit being willing to publicly admit how much they fucked up. Through info on user increase on Lemmy we’ll get an idea but it doesn’t mean those new users have completely stopped using Reddit.
This is impossible to know. It is more important to see what Lemmy is getting more so than what Reddit is loosing.
At least on the fediverse the number is realistic and not something for the shareholders.
Couldn’t agree more. People here need to be okay with the possibility that Reddit continues to be popular even though it will continue to be the same scummy company that treats its users like cattle. Those of us who care about that kind of stuff are a minority of the users. There are likely tens of thousands of people who lurk Reddit, click the ads, and don’t even know about the API debacle… and that’s okay, we should all let it go.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
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There likely won’t ever be an official number on how many users jumped ship. Even unofficial ones will be guestimates.
I expect it’s a low percentage of overall users. Many are using the official Reddit app and just complaining about it. Others have switched to surviving third party apps. Still others are strictly Old Reddit on desktop.
The moderator community have likely felt a greater hit.
This is not public information, you won’t know anything about that until the next quarterly reports. That being said if you go to the front page right now it seems pretty much like business as usual.
The quality of the obscure subs is dropping. Ironically, this is actually what is valuable to the LLMs.
The front page is mostly twitter and TikTok anyway.
To be fair, with a website as huge as reddit, a 25% or even 50% decrease in user activity probably won’t be that noticeable from someone like us. Instead of 2 million posts a day, it’s not now 1 million. Or instead of 500k, it’s 250k. None of those are knew we could feasibly differentiate.
Maybe if you sit on r/all and keep track of how fast new posts are moving, but even then, the algorithm may still just move the same number of posts up and down the main pages. So even then, it would be hard to tell if usage is down.
Now obviously there’s no way it’s down that much. It’s significantly lower. But I’m just saying even if we pretend that it was down that much, it would look like business as usual.
Also, either way, I’m still glad to find this place. It feels nicer and offers what I wanted in a way reddit couldn’t.
A saw a post a while back commenting on how many upvotes it was taking to get onto the front page of r/all having dropped, but not sure if there is any way to see stats from before API changes now.
One of the people on (I think) modcoord noted that for years reddit has allowed moderators to look at traffic stats for their subreddit. And that the traffic stats are no longer available; the last day they could access was … June 30.
I’m sure that’s just a coincidence, though …
The other method was looking at how many people are “here now” in each sub
Yeah you’re right that it wouldn’t be immediately noticeable but just because a few thousands of us jumped to Lemmy doesn’t mean there is any significant change on reddit. I checked on my most active communities and all the usual suspects are there, posting and commenting as usual. The amount of people that left reddit are probably a fraction of a percent.
The real question is how many power users and moderators left, the first are the ones that produce the most content, the second are the ones that prevent the place turning into a shithole. If an important fraction of those left, it WILL impact the site.
Precisely, the importance is if the mods stick around or not.
One sub I was in the Mod basically said a few weeks ago ‘I’ve had it with this, no offense guys but just run it how you want from now on’I’m retiring’. The users didn’t turn it into a protest sub but somehow it’s worse than that because it’s repetitive and boring.
So there’s a few old hands sticking around but I doubt there’ll be new people joining it. And I think that will be true for a lot of unmoderated subs, they won’t all get full of porn and spam, they’ll just become much less interesting
I didn’t fully quit reddit, but I’m going to Lemmy first and foremost and rarely go back to reddit for very specific communities. My reddit usage dropped by 90+% probably, but I’m not completely gone.
I’m sure the same is true for many other users as well, so simply counting the number of (active) users then and now won’t get even close to the actual loss in traffic and participation.
Same here. Since I was an Apollo user, there’s no loss of revenue though, and I haven’t posted much, barely any loss of new content.
I haven’t gone back to Reddit yet, but I’m sure I will at sometime for, like you said, some of the smaller communities or something specific I may not be able to find here for now. I’ll stay here as much as I can though, I’m sure it will only improve.
I quit reddit on my phone, and I’m never looking back. I’m still browsing Reddit with RES on my PCs though. So a drastic reduction in use.
Reddit feels like different now compared to a week ago. Browsing a new fresh site opened my eyes to how shit r/all are. Even with blocked subreddits a new hate fueled subreddit emerges every week.
It’s hard to say, but assuming they all went to Lemmy, you can get an approximation from this site: https://the-federation.info/platform/73
The number of active Lemmy users seems to have increased by ~50k last month.
It’s going to be hard to tell definitively, because so much traffic on the major platforms like Reddit are bots. As a percentage of overall traffic, the reduction may only be a few percentage points.
But all that traffic that is leaving are from Actual Humans. Humans who cared enough about their interactions to have preferences about how they engaged with Reddit. In a few years, Reddit will just be a bunch of bots talking to each other.
One of the founders of Reddit mentioned in an interview a while back that it was all bots when it started, to give the illusion of being populated when it was too new to have any users except the people who worked on it. From bots it came, and to bots it will return. The circle of life.
Well seems simple enough. You look at how many new users Lemmy got and subtract that from whatever reddit numbers are online. Only posters/commenters count for Lemmy activity, and the number of lurkers is likely several times bigger. Anyway so based on what I see online, Lemmy has about 50k active users, maybe up to 10x more lurkers. So like half a million users maybe. Reddit probably has 55 million users. So that’s still 11x bigger than Lemmy
So if I’m even remotely in the ballpark, Lemmy managed to grab like 1% of the reddit userbase & the management won the mainstream crowd as usual. Of course Lemmy isn’t ready for the volume and legal costs anyway
50k very active users that try to have integrity is a pretty big deal. Because with that will come development of the platform, meanwhile Reddit is going to struggle with a new chapter of shitty moderation and decreased quality. There are also a lot of people burnt out on the issue and so I expect real numbers from the immediate to be more visible over the next month or two.
Plus, which instances are you looking at for those numbers? Are all the lemmy instances and kbin included in those numbers?
Let’s just assume that it’s going to be about 1% of reddit’s userbase. Does it matter which 1%? How will the platforms evolve? Because both are very different now than before, we’re seeing realtime changes across a lot of tech and the internet. A lot of faith was lost by the public in many platforms by the people at all paying attention, and a lot of hope was garnished by the successful move to new platforms.
Stuff is definitely changing. I’m curious what big tech is gonna do to try to restore faith, or if they’ll try to pretend nothing’s happened and try to sweep it under the rug. A lot of people already try to downplay the events into just numbers, but in reality, there are a LOT of eyes watching and waiting to see what happens. People are tired of the same old capitalist bullshit and want something better, it isn’t just ex/reddittors, it’s Twitter users, Linux users, Amazon users, Netflix users, students with debt, homeowners, and a LOT of young people. People want better and the messed up economic future is making people pay attention more than ever.
It’s all interwoven and something’s gotta give.
It very much does. The old metric was that 1% create, 10% comment, and the rest consume (I don’t think the metric included a number for moderator-types). I suspect most of the emigres have a heavier percentage of moderators, creators, and commenters. And I suspect it also contains a larger percentage of old-time redditors. While there are undoubtedly a bunch of people stepping into place on reddit right now, the loss of the people who left is going to hurt reddit.
Loads of reddit refugees on tumblr, squabbles and Tildes too. Tumblr is fucking crawling with them/us at the moment.
That assumes people’s usage is all-or-nothing, though. I started using Lemmy and I now use reddit a lot less, but still use it for communities that don’t exist or aren’t active here. I don’t imagine I’m the only one in that boat.
I certainly stopped once RiF stopped working.
Yeah RIF was my go-to for years. Reddit is just not the same experience anymore, so I’m basically done with reddit going forward. Alternative or bust
I think it’s a good chunk but not enough to outright kill the site.
The shitshow that was Spez’s AMA certainly drove away a few users, but I think many more were hoping that they’d dial back the API changes at the eleventh hour to allow third-party apps to at least coexist.
What AMA? It was nothing more than 3-4 pre written comments that didn’t answer anything.
AMA means “ask me anything”
Not “ask only what I want to be asked”.
I have Wefwef now. I’m not lost, just on substitute.
What’s wefwef
https://wefwef.app
It’s like Apollo for Lemmy, I use it too. Sure there are some kinks to be ironed out and UX isn’t as smooth but I’m not going back to Reddit 😞
No real way to tell, but I don’t think it would be immediately noticeable on Reddit. Like the satisfying “we killed reddit” probably isn’t going to happen. On the other hand, being here clearly have discoverd the Fediverse as replacement, so IMO it doesn’t matter what happens to Reddit now. (Not to say the drama/any issues Reddit ends up with won’t be endlessly entertaining)
I definitely think getting interested in the fediverse is a long game. Think the death of Facebook. It was a slow burn between 2016 and 2020, involving lots of different communities moving at different times for different reasons
But…Facebook isn’t dead. I mean it’s dead to me, but it’s still going quite strong.
Exactly. Whether or not Facebook or Reddit or Netflix or Twitter survive, thrive, or perish is irrelevant to me.
What matters is that they won’t profit off my data, they won’t sell any ads from my activity, and they won’t get a penny more of subscription money out of me.
If others wish to continue diving down those rabbit holes, that’s on them.
Really? Feels like a graveyard when I log in. I mean everyone over 65 still uses it and there are a lot of weird holdouts but all my friends moved over to instagram, which is so much worse than facebook ever was IMO
People like Instagram over Facebook because it’s much, much harder to share links to ragebait on Instagram.
The secret sauce though is that one out of every 3 reels is ragebait. just a different kind that you cant get away from because you’re so addicted to the scroll feature
I used to think this until all of the recent blows they have had, such as the IAmA losses and Microsoft withdrawing their Minecraft support. With advertisers withdrawing and users leaving, I think they are going to have problems covering operating expenses in the near term that could lead to an implosion due to lack of funds.
Before all this started, Fidelity’s Reddit investment was devalued pretty heavily and they have had profitability issues. Tech companies in general are having investor problems due to interest rates so Reddit have problems is going to really scare away any risk-adverse investors. They have proven they cannot control their user base (which is good news for users) which scares advertisers away from content unfriendly to their interests. They just doubled their employees from like 1000 to 2000 in the past couple of years, which just adds astronomically to their operating expenses.
I think they make about $500 million in revenue and are still in the red. Even minor changes to this expense/income ratio can cause issues that make them suddenly insolvent with no one to bail them out.
What’s the Minecraft thing? I’m not on Reddit any more so missed that bit.
Minecraft devs left r/Minecraft and won’t use it as a source for news anymore. https://www.pcgamer.com/minecrafts-devs-exit-its-7-million-strong-subreddit-after-reddits-ham-fisted-crackdown-on-protest/
Good opportunity for them to host a separate instance with a Microsoft domain. That will contribute even more to their legitimately.
At least three: You, me, and some person who built this platform.
Disclaimer: It’s entirely possible two of the above individuals are bots.
Wait, could I be a bot too?? 😧
This statement is false
@IjonTichy Don’t think about it-don’t think about it-don’t think about it
@andxze @Mammal @CaptainBlagbird
Uh… True. I’ll go with true.
Good bot.
There are no bots here, human.
Sadly we won’t know the amount of users Reddit lost with Reddit being willing to publicly admit how much they fucked up. Through info on user increase on Lemmy we’ll get an idea but it doesn’t mean those new users have completely stopped using Reddit.
This is impossible to know. It is more important to see what Lemmy is getting more so than what Reddit is loosing. At least on the fediverse the number is realistic and not something for the shareholders.
Couldn’t agree more. People here need to be okay with the possibility that Reddit continues to be popular even though it will continue to be the same scummy company that treats its users like cattle. Those of us who care about that kind of stuff are a minority of the users. There are likely tens of thousands of people who lurk Reddit, click the ads, and don’t even know about the API debacle… and that’s okay, we should all let it go.