Last month marked the official end of the Reddit protests. Any subreddit that had changed its rules or gone dark — or forced its users to post exclusively about John Oliver — has now gone back to normal. On the surface, it seems like a complete victory for Reddit, but things aren’t so simple when a major element of that victory was forcibly removing moderators for dozens of communities. In fact, according to Reddit users, the protests have caused a major brain drain on the site. The question is: can you prove it? And the answer is: well, sort of, yes.
For the last six months, we’ve been tracking the top Reddit posts every month. When we first started, the subreddit with the most posts in the top 20 was r/OddlySatisfying, with three posts. As of last month, however, 10 of the top 20 posts all came from r/MadeMeSmile.
The fact that all of the top posts on Reddit are coming from the same subreddit, as far as we’re concerned, means either people aren’t browsing as much or there just aren’t as many people on Reddit. But it was hard to tell which was which, since the actual number of upvotes on the most popular posts are pretty identical to where they were six months ago. But investigating that, I found that Reddit has always had certain caps on how many upvotes a post can get, which suggests that isn’t a good way to measure. Over on Subreddit Stats, however, we found a much better way of working this out.
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.
This chart from SubredditStats show the daily comments and posts for 5 major subreddits: r/news, r/facepalm, r/mademesmile, r/oddlysatisfying, r/mildlyinfuriating.
And that’s how we’ve now ended up with a Reddit full of r/MadeMeSmile. And, just in case you’re curious about what that looks like — four of the top five Reddit posts were reposted TikToks.
Reddit was one of the last major spots online where you could expect to interact with people who aren’t making money off you. Which also why Reddit was able to completely replace its existing moderators since they were virtually all unpaid.
We’ve talked a lot about Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification”, but he was only talking about individual platforms. Larger trends like AI and crypto (or even pivoting to video) have a cascading effect on the process. One big platform trying something is enough to legitimize it, and soon everywhere you can go has a noticeably worse user experience. If people stay off Reddit, then the site definitely didn’t “win” the protests, but neither did anyone else.
When Reddit announced the API pricing that kicked all this off, they justified it by talking about lucrative AI tools trained on Reddit data, saying, “we don’t need to give all that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free”. Ironically, that’s exactly what you do every time you go online, and it looks like a lot of people have decided to choose the same thing for themselves by staying off Reddit.
I want to believe this is due to the protests and people noping out (and I bet some of it is) but this observation ignores the Covid effect.
Reddit aside, basically every online community I frequent has seen a major dip following the end of the worst of the pandemic. Slack and Discord communities I have been in for years have tanked considerably. Tons of YouTubers I follow have dropped off majorly in the frequency of new videos. Forums are way sleepier. Engagement on a lot of social sharing platforms I use is way down.
I think a big chunk of this is people being able to go out into the real world again and also having spent a couple years being chronically online because that was kinda all there was to do. And now they’re wanting anything but that.
All that said, I resigned from my mod positions on a few pretty large subs, wiped my 120k karma account of all comments and posts, and haven’t submitted a single thing to the site in about 2-3 months.
Good riddance, tbh
If you look at the charts the drop started in July. Most people stopped caring about Covid last year. I don’t think it was that much of a factor.
A year ago was already well after the worst of the pandemic though.
Yeah, thr reduction of 90% maybe caused by covid recovery. But AskReddit, for example, has dropped off suddenly almost 50% in the end of July based on here https://subredditstats.com/r/AskReddit (scroll down to comments and post per day)