Excerpt:
Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.
I migrated entirely to Lemmy and I don’t regret it. I do miss the amount of content on Reddit, but at least I know I’m not supporting them anymore.
14 year redditor and I go back and forth (only for 2 subreddits) but majority of reddit, including the news portions are completely dead. RIP r/pbsnews. I vow not to comment or submit any new links for them.
Same. I will say though, my phone usage overall has gone wayyyyy down. So. Thanks, Reddit?
Yeah, I spend half as much time just endlessly scrolling anymore. Phone use is down and the time I spend on my PC feels more productive too.
I do a lot more reading books when I want stimulation now. I still browse lemmy if I’ve only got a few minutes, like waiting for a build to finish in Visual Studio, but I’ll grab my ereader for anything longer than that.
Ditto. Lemmy could see more content, but the current amount is enough to keep me entertained.
Frankly the only two situations nowadays when I open Reddit is 1) cross-checking stuff posted in this comm, and 2) copypasting stuff from Reddit to Lemmy to avoid giving it more pageviews.
I moved the Reddit content I wanted into an RSS feed by putting the subreddit URL followed by /.rss into the feed URL and it works
I never knew this. I tried with https://www.reddit.com/r/watercolour/.rss as a test. I can the the images are in the feed. But, my readers are not showing them. Do you have any suggestions on getting image previews to work?
I’m not real sure what the issue is but I can confirm that’s the same URL format that I use. I use Feeder on Android if that helps
that’s what I use yes. Do you get images for that URL? If you don’t mind a quick check? Then at least I can dig into feeder.
Huh. Yeah I’m not getting them either, and after looking into my other feeds that do have images it looks like those are either video preview images or links to articles, so I guess it doesn’t support native reddit image uploads maybe?
thanks for testing, I do appreciate that. Thats a shame, but it is what it is.
- bdonvr ( @bdonvr@thelemmy.club ) 2•1 year ago
Same, but I justify it to myself by the fact that I spend significantly less time doomscrolling.
Because the most active contributing users left. I used to comment a lot on reddit, but I’ve been exclusively on Lemmy since my 3rd party app was axed.
And I’ve been very active here. Like, even on this alt account that I made 16 days ago, my app says my post “karma” is already higher than my reddit comment karma was from over a decade.
I feel more willing to contribute because there’s a sense of community, and I’m not just providing free entertainment for a company to profit off of.
Between you and @Rand_al_Thor must cover 50% of stuff I see
I’ve been having fun doing it. I just post a few memes throughout the day whenever I think about it, and I also try to spread it out among some smaller communities that I want to help grow.
So, memes and a handful of communities that I’m personally interested in.
There’s another Rand? I must meet this man over at Wheeloftime!
I win again, Lews Therin.
Hell yeah another place to subscribe to!! Thanks for linking it
I’ve commented more on lemmy in 3 months than the last 10 years on Reddit
Glad you’re here, nutbiggums!
Shit. I think it took me 5 years on reddit to comment once. Now I have alts! Alts!
I used to comment a lot on reddit
Same. I had a 15 year account with a couple hundred thousand karma and commented and posted a lot. If you piss off the people who actually use the site you will reap what you sow. Reddit should have known that since the exact scenario happened fir Digg when everyone migrated to reddit.
They looked at the leaves, and failed to see the forest, thinking that simply not killing old.reddit was enough to avoid Digg-ing the grave. Because from their view that’s how Digg died - v4 happened, users couldn’t go back, they got pissy, and they left.
@megane_kun@lemm.ee is also right when he says that they compared Reddit with other social media platforms and took the wrong conclusions. What keeps people in Facebook aren’t “content creators” or what have you, but their relatives and friends; in Reddit there’s no such thing, people weren’t there because of more people but because of the content that those people created, so their connection with the platform is considerably weaker.
I also think that the trust thermocline played a role. It wasn’t the first time that the platform pissed its own users.
Agreed on the reasons why FB stayed relatively strong despite its reputation going down the drain. What kept many people from leaving FB for good is actually network effects: that one’s friends and family, coworkers and colleagues, are more likely to be in FB than not in it. Huffman’s site? Not so much. I don’t care if someone I know IRL is in it, and I sure as hell wouldn’t want them to know I used it.
The platform formerly known as Twitter is a more apt comparison, to be honest, but it’s still way too early to tell if it has actually weathered the storm, or has become so rotten on the inside that it’d spectacularly fail in the near future.
Perhaps Twitter is a third can of worms, it’s neither about content (as Reddit) nor the users’ social circles (as FB), more like a few anchor people keeping the others there. Due to that Musk’s idea (to pay creators to stay there) might actually help.
I still think that it’ll fail due to other decisions Musk took, but less spectacularly than Reddit. Musk is at least trying to think by himself, Spez is simply following others.
I think Steve Huffman is only after the possible profits he’d make on the IPO. He doesn’t care if his reputation would be sullied amongst the proles like us, nor does he care if he’s being original and ground-breaking. He just cares about the money.
Will it work though? I want to bet on the possibility that his IPO will fail due to all the bad news about his site as of recent, but given that the world in general has been disappointing recently, I’ll just keep my money to myself, lol!
He is after the IPO money but Dunning-Kruger is the hell of a drug, Spez is simply not a good CEO and he doesn’t know how to maximise pre-IPO numbers. So odds are that he thought “who’s in the same situation as me? Ah, The Iron Man¹! He’s a cool guy, has lots of money and a platform like mine. I assume that he knows what he is doing², so I’ll ape what he did!”. Musk killed 3PAs and got rid of the people criticising his platform, so did Spez.
And killing 3PAs pre-IPO does actually have some merit. They created value³ for Reddit, but detracted from the immediate profit; but if you’re selling the company you don’t care about the value, you care about the immediate profit to show your potential buyers “see? This company is profitable, gib lotsa moni”. However odds are that things happened faster than Spez predicted, odds are that he assumed that the protests would last a bit and die, not that people would say “enough of this shit”. And now odds are that he lost that “magical” window of opportunity to maximise Reddit’s price to the potential new buyers.
- I cringed writing this.
- Spoilers: Musk does not know what he’s doing.*spoilers: he does not.
- By “value” here I mean the potential of a company to generate profit over time.
Hahahaha~ If it’s any consolation to you, I also cringed reading the part that made you cringe while writing it. More than enough cringe for all of us to share around!
Yeah, you actually said out loud what I was just thinking to myself when I wrote my previous reply. Not exactly what you wrote, but I was thinking that if it worked for others, it’s good enough for himself. Why think of a good idea when you can just copy others’? Something along those lines. However, copying ideas actually does take some work as well. It’s not enough to just copy what they did and apply it to your situation. You’ve also got to think about whether or not what you’re copying is a good fit for your circumstances.
About the third point though, the way I see it is that Huffman tried his best (the key word is ‘tried’) to increase the profitability of his site to entice potential buyers, which even though it’d detract from immediate profitability, would add to the money he’d cash out at the IPO in the end—or so he imagines. Agreed with how things didn’t happen according to how Steve anticipated them though. And in fairness to Huffman, other flareups have ended in a similar way. What he didn’t anticipate is how these changes (the API changes) will affect how a lot of people (and the ones that contribute a lot of content) would interact with his site. So, yeah!
I’m always happy to see a Teft post pop up in my feed.
Life before death, Radiant.
It’s easy to argue why they thought it’s not going to happen to them. They saw Facebook shrug off all of its scandals, and thought that being in a similar position, network effects are going to help them weather any storm. And it can be argued that Steve Huffman and his site did weather this particular storm. But like Facebook, trust in Huffman’s site have taken a blow, and in the demographic that they would ill afford to antagonize.
That we’re starting to see its effects as early as now should scare any sane person in Huffman Inc.
Wow I was on there longer than you and I don’t think I broke 10k haha
I know the ways of karma farming. It ain’t much but it’s an honest living.
I’ve been very active here
I’ve noticed your posts almost every day and appreciate them
Thank you, 🍝
I had over 300k comment karma, on the site every single day for about 10 years. Comparing the comments here vs there it’s crazy I hung around so long. It’s like getting out of an abusive relationship, you don’t realize how much you’re being mistreated until you’re out from under them.
Same. Thing is, I would usually get gold like once or twice a month. I would post well sourced, long and often highly upvoted comments. Try to be genuinely helpful or insightful. I used to be a journalist, it was an outlet for me.
Not that they were that great, redditers upvoting stuff doesn’t make a comment right or interesting, and wasting too much time there was really not something to be proud of, but if just ten thousand users like you and me quit reddit, that leaves mainly teenagers, bots and ‘comedians’ rehashing the same tired puns.
It can effectively kill smaller subreddits, as has quite obviously happened in some cases.
We weren’t just customers, we also produced a disproportionate amount of the content on reddit. More than our relatively small numbers would suggest. IRC the 1% rule states that only 1% of users actively post/comment. If you’re posting relatively coherent or thought out comments, you’re the 1% of that 1%.
Yeah. Lemmy users aren’t saints but there’s a lot more friendly, cool and deep discussion than on Reddit. In the last year before I left, I had felt it’s gone so shallow.
No offense I thought you were a bot given how often I see your username haha. Good on you! You are helping to make this a better place
Beep boop, I like sharing memes
(Thanks!)
I’m sure the notifications are annoying you by now, but I’d like to borrow the moment to agree with everyone else. You’re one of the users who have ended up becoming this place’s lifeblood somehow, and I pretty much always enjoy whatever you post. Or at least, a ton of what I enjoy ends up having your name on it.
I heavily appreciate seeing you around and while you are allowed to slow down for the sake of your sanity, I would notice and miss it.
Not an annoyance at all! I don’t have push notifications on, so I just check whenever I open the app next.
And I really appreciate the kind words. I’m just happy to support lemmy growing, one dumb meme at a time.
I’ve definitely seen you around a lot lately. 😁 Thanks for the joy and memes.
I was never famous on Reddit but I was a prolific commenter for six years. I gradually phased out from Reddit as I got into Lemmy until July, when I pledged not to comment or vote on Reddit ever again. I’ve since kept my word.
You’re not alone. Just check https://subredditstats.com/r/technology or any other sub you used to visit and you’ll see a clear drop in comments/day. After the APIcalypse, so many people just left and never came back.
Wow, this is really interesting! I checked a few, and you can see a severe drop in activity.
Every sub I cheked got totally nuked to oblivion. No wonder why people are complaining about the quality. Hardly anyone is there to comment or vote.
I opened reddit on desktop yesterday for the first time in a while, and I had received a survey from the Admins.
I’ve never received something like that before. The questions made it seem like they’re trying to figure out why people are unhappy.
Sounds like an easy question. RIP RIF (and all the other apps), therefore Reddit is nolonger fun.
I feel like this is by design. Reddit never wanted to be a discussion board. It wants users to keep scrolling so they see more ads.
Oh, that is a good point actually. However, drop in comments is probably also associated with a drop in quality posts and the number of people who upvote them.
how do you know how much karma you have in total?
I never thought it would be so easy to stop going on Reddit, but this place is good enough
- Taleya ( @Taleya@aussie.zone ) 50•1 year ago
Content creators left.
You lose those, you’re fucked. A full fckin 80-90% of any given user base are consumers / commenters and they follow content. Creators are a keystone species.
Yeah. Reddit seemed to view users like every other social media app without realizing that a lot of the successful apps compensate those who add value to the app.
The official app seems ok for consuming content, but it was dogshit for meaningful interaction.
If you open Reddit without an account on a browser, it will automatically create a username for you when you are on site now. Hopped on to look at a post on a semi active subreddit and saw I was somehow logged in, but it was an auto generated account name. Wonder if they are trying to boost numbers that way as well
We did it Lemmy!
I haven’t been back. I also blocked it on PiHole and Kagi, so they don’t even show up in my search results. Reddit is dead to me.
Other than Lemmy, where did users go?
Likely Discord, playing games, outside… a few perhaps to oldschool forums.
Discord, Instagram, Telegram, (fark :P) would be my guesses.
The library
Private chat rooms has been my guess for a number of years. The internet got too public. Big boards aren’t practical anymore.
I would probably still post on reddit if I could do it from my phone in an app that actually works instead of being a glorified ad platform. They killed 3rd party apps to bully users to switch to the official app to boost the usage stats to have a better angle to haggle for their IPO. Problem is that the official app is just excruciatingly painful to use if you are accustomed to a proper reddit browsing tool.
The backhanded, sneaky way they did it with all the denial and lies was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Instead of being upfront and calling a spade a spade, they commited to a hostile takeover and removed all doubt that reddit is going to stay a platform for the people.
If they would have been honest from the get-go I might have continued posting.
All the people on r/piracy there better jump ship before Reddit sells all their info to Big Brother
Too late. Thankfully the piracy Lemmy instance is fairly strong.
Hey, at least the attention whoring subs are getting a lot of frontpage time XD
Like the “amiugly” and all its variants, which I didn’t even know existed until after the fiasco pushed them to get on the r/all frontpage.
Well, they did say that about only the 10% of users were the ones who make comments and engage with the communities, and guess what, that 10% did use more likely than not, the third party apps. I’ve been a redditor for more than 16 years with a lot of karma, I deleted all my accounts but one, the oldest I had. I’ve been back for a couple of niche communities but I haven’t commented nor upvoted anything.
Another factor that they probably didn’t consider is that those 10% were, on average, more informed about what was happening and what happened in the past (see spoiler for examples). So for a lot of those people in the 10%, even if they didn’t use the 3PAs (I predict that a lot of them were desktop users), it was the straw breaking the camel’s back - I bet that some people felt outright disgusted for contributing with the profits of a disgusting company like Reddit Inc.
List of examples:
- A Reddit admin defending a paedophile. People being banned left and right for highlighting this.
- The above showing that Reddit has tools to prevent harassment, but won’t use them to protect users.
- The whole “we’ll quarantine TD to shut protesters up, but we still want its posters to feel at home here, so we won’t ban the sub until it’s inactive”.
- Spoiling the “Reddit silver” joke for profit.
- Using Ellen Pao as a scapegoat.
- Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, it’s almost like Reddit Inc. says “Reddit users are those stupid things, of course if you throw any bullshit on their snouts they’ll happily swallow it”. Every fucking announcement smelled like bullshit, specially coming from that sociopath called Steve Huffman.
How was Ellen Pao a scapegoat? It’s been a while. Ive been a 13 year redditor somibr pretty much seen everything including the Pao bullshit but I don’t recall her being a scapegoat so much as her saying a lot of stupid stuff.
Then again, it’s been a while
Here’s a link for further info. Accordingly to the previous CEO (Yishan Wong), u/kn0thing forced Pao to fire the communication director Victoria Taylor, also known as the person who organised the AMAs (a big deal for Reddit back then, and largely responsible for its popularity). u/kn0thing eventually admitted to be responsible for firing Taylor, but Pao was the one that took the userbase’s backslash.
And while this is conjecture, I’m led to believe that she was also a scapegoat on creating the precedent for banning subreddits. The userbase hated her, as that was seen as “going too far”, and yet this would become necessary as the site grew (and the subreddits in question were harassing people IRL). Then the following CEO (Huffman) would use and abuse subreddit bans, but since the precedent was already there, users didn’t blame him for that.
Accordingly to the previous CEO (Yishan Wong), u/kn0thing forced Pao to fire the communication director Victoria Taylor
TIL!
I remember the Victoria debacle. Seriously WHY did they fire her anyway? Its like… “Here we have liquid gold… Lets throw it in the trash!” but I thought that Pao was responsible for that, yeah.
Lurking is fine. It just uses their server resources and doesn’t give them much value
I kept my ancient account as well, but I did remove all my posts and comments.
Mine is more like,
Because even if Lemmy didn’t get huge I still want to watch Reddit die.
The
roofreddit, theroofreddit, theroofreddit is on fireWe don’t need no water let the motherfucker burn
The completely unblockable hegetsus ads were really what made me switch to Apollo from the official Reddit app. Then killing third party apps made me leave for good. Bravo, Reddit
I totally forgot about hegetsus until now.
We were having a good day.
We were ALL having a good day.
Those ads were pretty based tbh
