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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • How is it possible, that with 90% of subbreddits set to private, the number of posts and comments created on reddit do not decrease according to https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/? (EDIT: I might have based this percent on false information, see EDIT at end of comment. But I leave the following paragraphs unchanged for history.)

    Activity only decreased by 20-30% if I’m being generous looking at the graph. How is this possible, is the graph accurate? How can 10% of subreddits be so active, like nothing happened? That would meanthe remaining 70-80% of activity is happening in 10% of the subreddits which are still open! Which is craaazy.

    I have a theory - maybe we are underestimated the amount of bots on the site and they operating like nothing happened in the open subreddits? If this would be the case (and I’m gonna enter speculation and conspiracy territory here), but what if certain parties have quotas to fulfill for advertisers or propaganda machines, so they have to post (using bots or other means)?

    I struggle to find the cause of this anomaly, of course you wouldn’t see 1:1 decrease in subbreddits going dark and activity, because people are subscibed to plethora of subbreddits. But I thought that it’ll be at least 50-60% decrease in post activity. Worst case scenario is that these are real users creating real posts and comments, because that would make this protest moot - It would just show reddit management that the community doesn’t matter, general public who come to the site will still interact with the remaining slop, advertisers rejoice.

    EDIT: I based the 90% number on this site’s statistic: https://reddark.untone.uk/. My understanding was that these subreddits makes up for most of all subs on reddit. Turns out, as @[email protected] mentioned in this comment, these are only subreddits that participate in the blackout. Based on the README.md of this reddark fork, it pulls the list of participating subreddits from the threads on r/ModCoord.

    However I still feel the impact of the blackout a little lackluster. If this is the case, this statistic could be explained by another phenomenon: that the distribution of reddit activity by subreddits have an incredibly long tail. Meaning, that a significant portion of comments and posts are created in a very large quantity of small subs, which does not participate in the protest.



  • I’m also a new user and to be honest, it’s pretty much the same browsing experience for me. I use Jerboa, and browse all for now, subscribing to subs that I like. I’m on Beehaw, and it federates with a lot of instances, I can pretty much find all the entertainment I would want from reddit.

    Even more so, the community is much more frendly, cozier and there are much less noise and significantly more meaningful conversation which I truly appreciate.

    I won’t delete my account on reddit, because even though I loathe their practices, I also dislike removing information - I’m all for archiving discussions and information.


  • Even more so, I agree with @tangentism’s thought in this post “It’s great that subs and users are organising to fight this but maybe Reddit should be allowed to carry out this change and metaphorically shoot itself in the face? This is just the latest in a long horrifying series of policies that the admins have pushed through, actions they have failed to take, or when they finally did, it was long after the horse had bolted.”

    If Reddit would backstep from this change somehow, then the rare opportunity of change will close shortly. Reddit just needs to push this through and hopefully it’ll burn itself down.