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Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

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Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#81

Post by davesmylie »

veqq wrote: post #79
davesmylie wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about "only garbage gets posted". In one of the craft based subs I moderate (5m subs - reasonably sized one), it's not so much the quality of posts has dropped, it's that the quantity has dropped, and dropped significantly. This seems to directly translate to garbage posts getting a lot more visibility and sticking around for a lot longer. The good quality posts are still there, but proportionally the ga…

> the quantity has dropped, and dropped significantly Mine's gone from 1-1.5k to 2-400 posts a day.

I suspect over time the numbers will grow back to where they were.... but it's gonna be a completely different crowd that what made it great originally.

reddit wants to jump on to the low-effort click-drawing content bandwagon - whilst good for their numbers in short term I think low term it's not going to be great. I know for my sub, the discord community has now taken off and is probably more vibrant than the sub currently is.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#82

Post by candiddevmike »

Pathogen-David wrote: post #80
thaumaturgy wrote: post #48

The end result was a stalemate. Reddit did not change any of its policies. Enough of the people responsible for posting and managing content left the platform to cause a noticeable impact on it. Here's a fun thing to look at, https://subredditstats.com/ for any major subreddit, e.g.: https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews https://subredditstats.com/r/explainlikeimfive https://subredditstats.com/r/videos All of the mo…

I took the protest as an opportunity to quit my 12 year Reddit addiction cold turkey and never came back, seems like I'm not the only one. Sometimes I miss /r/houseplants but I'm better off overall.

What did you switch to?

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#83

Post by Macha »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #65
caslon wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Heads up! This data is likely out of date or inaccurate now that Reddit has decided to kill the open ecosystem that existed around Reddit. I don't earn any money from this site, and if my calculations are correct it'd cost me a couple thousand dollars per month with their new API pricing, so yeah. If you can, it's probably worth leaving Reddit for other platforms - especially open-source/federated ones like Lemmy.…

That message on subredditstats is more recent than the sharp drop; the drop appeared during and immediately after the protest, and the users didn't come back. The policy change took effect shortly after, and subredditstats only recently added that message to their pages (it wasn't there ~week ago). It also passes the sniff test. Pick any of the largest subreddits from the list and look at its front page. r/funny, wit…

Another data point:

r/anime does a weekly ranking of show discussion threads based on activity.

Fall 2022, week 2: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fu...

Fall 2023, week 3: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F9...

In 2022, The top show has 21,000 votes and 4,000 comments. 2 others have more than 1,000 comments, 4 have more than 4,000 votes, and 13 have more than 300 comments, including the 16th most popular show.

In 2023, the top show has 4,231 votes and 700 comments. 1 other show have more than 4,000 votes, 1 has more than 1,000 comments, and 8 are above 300 comments.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#84

Post by punkspider »

x86x87 wrote: post #18
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #2

Some Reddit communities fled to other platforms such as Lemmy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network) Many subreddit moderators protested in various ways and were removed and replaced. Reddit never agreed or compromised and for the most part the movement seems to have run out of steam. Maybe if Reddit squeezes more, more users will go to Lemmy and similar alternative platforms?

Nah. A lot of power users are gone. Now it will slowly slide into irrelevance.

Reddit's Google traffic is growing at this time. The only time it was higher was in March 2022, according to SEMrush.

This is because Google is assigning more weight to user-generated content, since the rise of AI-generated content, and I believe traffic will keep growing.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#85

Post by n2d4 »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #48

The end result was a stalemate. Reddit did not change any of its policies. Enough of the people responsible for posting and managing content left the platform to cause a noticeable impact on it. Here's a fun thing to look at, https://subredditstats.com/ for any major subreddit, e.g.: https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews https://subredditstats.com/r/explainlikeimfive https://subredditstats.com/r/videos All of the mo…

This is just straight misinformation. If you go on any of the "big subs" you linked, you'll see that there are far more comments than that per day. For example, in ELI5, by just taking the 5 most commented posts that were posted in the last 24h, they have 700 comments which is more than the peak that Subreddit Stats says they had since July.

Instead, if you go on Subreddit Stats and read the text with the big red font, you'll see the explanation why the API changes have made such a difference:

> Heads up! This data is likely out of date or inaccurate now that Reddit has decided to kill the open ecosystem that existed around Reddit. I don't earn any money from this site, and if my calculations are correct it'd cost me a couple thousand dollars per month with their new API pricing, so yeah. If you can, it's probably worth leaving Reddit for other platforms - especially open-source/federated ones like Lemmy.

My assumption is the maintainer just hasn't edited their scraper at all, and it's now running into lots of rate limiting and missing most new comments and posts. The fact that subscriber growth has remained constant supports that thesis.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#86

Post by chaosharmonic »

rabbits_2002 wrote: post #43

A massive decline in post quality. I don’t know what happened but ever since the blackout only garbage gets posted. Even the quality of niche subreddits has fallen. I think the blackout meant that all the well moderated “good” subreddits closed while the bad ones stayed open. Now the bad subreddits are more popular and have eclipsed the good subreddits. As for other websites, Lemmy and other federated aggregators hav…

Yeah, several of the more technical subs that I used to frequent either just never reopened or splintered off to Lemmy. Some (like /r/Android) actually have entire instances.

I personally wrote a userscript to wipe every post comment I've ever made, and have limited my usage to a few particular subs that I still lurk (/r/LocalLLaMA in particular) just bc Lemmy still doesn't seem to have a comparable level of activity.

Speaking of which I'm still trying to sort out the situation involving which instances federate with which, and where to actually set up a primary account, and what the interop situation with different Fediverse platforms is even like in general for that matter.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#87

Post by lupusreal »

candiddevmike wrote: post #82
Pathogen-David wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took the protest as an opportunity to quit my 12 year Reddit addiction cold turkey and never came back, seems like I'm not the only one. Sometimes I miss /r/houseplants but I'm better off overall.

What did you switch to?

When I left reddit I didn't "switch to" anything. When I left I found it didn't leave a void that needed filling. When I was using I thought I needed reddit or something like reddit, but I was wrong.

7 years clean, I'm never going back.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#88

Post by buildbot »

ben_w wrote: post #64
buildbot wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t matter, because importantly, now they can game it however they need for their IPO. I stopped posting and know many others who did. The platform lost a lot and the front page is noticeably more trashy/Facebook like than it used to be.

> trashy/Facebook Don't mistake "bad for people like us" with "bad for business" — Duolingo appears to be doing fantastically well as a corporation despite having deliberately made themselves into something I found painful to use and therefore stopped using. Facebook is rolling in money despite being your example of bad. Tabloid newspapers sell very well.

Oh I don't - I'm sure they will (probably) make plenty of money.

Then again, TikTok seems more popular by the day across most groups of people I interact with - technical and non-technical millennials and boomers all use it very extensively in my group of friends and acquaintances.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#89

Post by e2le »

hamandcheese wrote: post #45

I never was a huge Reddit user before, but I have noticed an increase in lower-quality reddit-style comments here on HN in the last year or so. Thankfully they usually get downvoted or are already dead. I might have to turn off showdead though.

The quality of comments on Reddit has also declined.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#90

Post by Racing0461 »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #48

The end result was a stalemate. Reddit did not change any of its policies. Enough of the people responsible for posting and managing content left the platform to cause a noticeable impact on it. Here's a fun thing to look at, https://subredditstats.com/ for any major subreddit, e.g.: https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews https://subredditstats.com/r/explainlikeimfive https://subredditstats.com/r/videos All of the mo…

Is the data correct tho? Since its mos tlikely using the same api that was cencelled causing th eblackouts.
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