https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/reddit-mods-fear-spam-overload-as-botdefense-leaves-antagonistic-reddit/
Mod-made tool claims to have banned 144,926 spambot accounts.
Title says it all. If you think Reddit's been trending down lately, just wait.
Nah, nearly 90% of mobile users interact with Reddit via the official app (most people use Reddit on mobile devices).
Damn, it's so strange knowing that it's so bad and yet people use it. Goes to show just how important the content is even with such terrible UX.
most people don't even bother trying it, from the few that I've seen that do converted real quick.
These numbers have been thrown around since the beginning of the protest. I don’t believe Reddit actually publishes that data (someone can come and correct me if wrong).
I think what happened is someone did the math on downloads for all the 3PA (or maybe just just major ones) and compared it to active users.
Fact is, no one knows just how many users used 3PA vs the official app except for reddit. Me thinks because the data doesn’t look good for them, otherwise why not back up all that boasting with numbers.
I too am curious. It would also be insightful to see where the real OC comes from, I would think most casual users browsing and occasionally commenting would be on the official app. Where the users who contribute popular, useful content are likely on a 3rd party app and/or pc
I'd guess account age correlates pretty strongly with 3PA usage as well - the older the account, the more likely to use a 3PA, since that's all that existed for mobile browsing back when Reddit was new.
There was a post on r/dataisbeautiful that pulled the estimated values from the app stores. The author noted the massive grains of salt we should take with those figures, and that they couldn't get reliable data from desktop browser use.
I'm not bothering to get the link for two reasons. 1) the aforementioned reasons to be skeptical anyways, and 2) fuck giving reddit some ad revenue.