Do we at this point have any substantial data on just how many users Reddit actually lost due to this?
Any resources would be greatly appreciated.
As a sidenote, I’ll add that they certainly lost my account the second I couldn’t use RiF anymore.
You probably can’t judge the loss in user count anyway. 99% of the users never actively contribute anything, not even upvotes or so.
I tend to disagree. Most of the users that actually cared enough about the API changes to make the switch to Lemmy were powerusers. I think most casual lurkers use the official app anyway and didn’t care about the protests.
Hell naw, I’m a lurker (on Reddit). I used Apollo because I’m an IT guy and I can’t stand ads.
I feel like I actually should start interacting here though, because I’m not being over spoken / silenced by AI bots and algorithms
Edit: I am already halfway to my number of updoots on my Reddit account of 7 years… it’s working! Be the change you want to see!
nevermind AIs, people will dogpile you and just generally be dicks over on that site even over something innocuous, and it’s great being somewhere that spectre isn’t hanging over your head
I can’t stand ads and scabs, and I feel like a scab if I open reddit now.
I had an 8 year old account with a few hundred thousand karma, deleted it on July 1st once BaconReader went down.
Switching to Lemmy makes me want to participate even more and hopefully foster more people to join.
I had an active 11 year old account that I deleted.
The final straw for me was an interaction with a ham fisted admin these last few days. It really and honestly is a toxic environment there, and the admins are following the lead from Spez, so it’s deeply embedded into the culture.
I wonder if you could have sold those accounts. You get done money and Reddit gets worse. Win-win.
The karma is such a psychological thing.
In real life, it translates to nothing. But it makes it just that slightly harder to close an account.
All I can say is I was one of the technical users that asked obscure questions that had no relevant results when searching before posting, and I tried to answer any questions I could. I haven’t even visited reddit since the 9th of June and I never will visit it again. All of my searches on the internet include “-reddit” now too. I don’t care, fuck spez. My password was saved in Infinity, I don’t remember it, and I don’t want to. Whenever someone starts a class action lawsuit over CCPA I’ll file and join.
Now I understand where the negativity came from from some redditors; Lemmy is really not lurker friendly, you can’t just browse All as easily and see quick dopamine hits.
Addicts? ::shakes head::
Powerusers ::nods::
Yes, that’s what I meant. Reddit lost all the power users, which were just a small percentage of all users. So in numbers it doesn’t look too bad for reddit, but it actually is bad because they lost the good users which actually provide content.
This is anecdotal, but I was neither an app user or a moderator on reddit, but I decided to leave when Huffman became an ass to the mods. I think you underestimate the chance to protest against corporate assholes.
Power users are the ones who build value on reddit, so with their loss the standard users will get less out of reddit over time and likely use it less.
I used the official app, but still supported the protest.
I disagree from what I’ve seen so far. Most of the discussions I’ve seen lately about newly migrated reddit users have been folks who were lurkers or mostly lurkers. I myself used to be active on reddit years ago, but have been a lurker for a good 6-7+ years now or so. I think you’re correct as of a few weeks ago when powerusers may have migrated earlier, but I think the migration post-API implementation has been a large amount of non-powerusers. Of course, users that are 100% casual, and don’t have accounts at all or only rarely used Reddit, and might not even be aware of what’s going on, those folks I’m sure didn’t really move.
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.
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.
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.
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I’ve been keeping track of this tracker and since July 1, peak comments/post per minute have definitely gone down. Although as the site mentions, you really shouldn’t draw any firm conclusions from that. Just interesting to see.
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.
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
Out of the hundreds of millions of redditors i’m sure some people will pick up the slack of content creation and moderation. Now will they do a good enough job ? I don’t know, i bet spez is betting they will, but only time will tell.
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.
Because front page wasn’t user generated anymore.
Frontpage by the very way it works will always be the same it picks up the top content, and even if a larger portion left would still leave plenty of posts. The forntpage worked 10 years ago when it was 10% the size.
It is looking at the mid size subs that will be interesting
It looks different for me - I didn’t want to go back, so I just installed Reddit Enhancement Suite and the old.reddit redirect and disabled my ad blockers for it, and sure enough it looks like garbage now so it’s easy to remember not to use it.
Eventually but at the moment most users are using both Lemmy and Reddit but soon the quality of content will shift from reddit to Lemmy and that will be the end of reddit. Post quality memes, questions and answers to kill reddit quickly
I hadn’t saved a meme from Reddit in a looooong time.
Joined lemmy July 1st and have been filling my phone with memes.
This place seriously reminds me of old Reddit. We don’t need a huge influx of users. Maybe just a few more but it’s pretty much perfect as is.
this ^^. even if we peel off 5% in a relatively even scrape across all the interests that’s enough content for me to scratch the itch daily.
Post quality memes, questions and answers to kill reddit quickly
Uhhh, about that…
*hides beans*
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.
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 don’t think Reddit is imploding overnight but there seems to be an element of death by a thousand cuts happening. I’ve left and burned out three old usernames and over ten years worth of posts/comments. I’ll still use it to find answers to things but increasingly over the last month the threads are peppered with deleted comments and gaps
There likely won’t ever be an official number on how many users jumped ship. Even unofficial ones will be guestimates.
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
Loads of reddit refugees on tumblr, squabbles and Tildes too. Tumblr is fucking crawling with them/us at the moment.
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.
Does it matter which 1%?
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.
there’s a distorting effect here too, years ago policy changes on reddit had some contributors stop almost entirely. I spent a large amount of the last few years shit posting if i posted at all.
We may have a large chunk of the current 1% of content creators and as number of dormant creators re-activating after years. It does explain the pace of some of these communities.
I don’t like the distinction between commenting and creation tbh. Comments were most of reddit’s valuable content. 90% of everything else in the past few years has just been rehosting content from tiktok and Instagram
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.
Well you can take the knowledge that Lemmy.world grew 60% following it, look at current numbers for the server, and know at least around 60% of that number has shifted some of their media habits away from Reddit.
But the full picture is unknowable outside Reddit corporate.
Probably more than spez was anticipating though…
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It’s only been three days since the API change. Give it a month and we might have a bit of usable data, but for precise information, we’ll need to wait a few months or even up to a year.
It actually hasn’t. The api hasn’t been changed. Reddit is such a shit show they didn’t make their own deadline. Apps that didn’t take themselves down in advance still work.
Theres still a wave to come I think.
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Weird. Several apps, such as infinity (plus others reporting ones that don’t plan to go subscription based are working still - boost, stealth, rif when logged out, and relay and someone said their bot was still chugging along), still work fine with no subscription. That, plus this post indicating that changes will over over the best few weeks, makes me feel like it’s not being revoked uniformly or smoothly.
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/14nbw6g/updated_rate_limits_going_into_effect_over_the/
This is false. RIF clearly gets rate limited. Occasionally it will actually load the front page but every other time it throws 429 errors
Infinity is not. Also, this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/14nbw6g/updated_rate_limits_going_into_effect_over_the/
The api changes will occur in the following weeks.
Also, apparently RIF works when not logged in from what ive read. Its actually an oauth thing.
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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.
