https://www.pcmag.com/news/as-reddit-crushes-protests-its-user-traffic-returns-to-normal
User visits and time spent on the social media platform normalize after traffic to Reddit briefly dipped last week during the blackout, according to SimilarWeb.
Names cannot have spaces in programming, so there's all sorts of well known and discussed schemes like camel, kebab, snake etc.
Well, user traffic has returned to normal, but we also have to consider that it's just traffic. Some of that traffic is also a bunch of people talking about Reddit, protesting, etc.
That being said, I don't think Reddit will die from this, but it doesn't need to in order for the Fediverse to succeed. All it needs is to push enough people onto federated services and kickstart it, just like Twitter did with Mastodon. We aren't going to all switch overnight, it will be a gradual process.
My own reddit traffic has dropped right off since I discovered Lemmy. For now this place has the feel of the early internet: democratic, distributed and friendly. It really makes clear how repugnant Reddit has become.
It really does have that feel!
As someone who was around back then, being in the fediverse actually makes me feel young and lighthearted again.
I hadn't fully realised quite how soul-sucking the corporate web 2.0 was until now I'm completely off it.
Same for me. Lemmy still has some rough edges but even the apps that are available now are really good as they are. Improvements are happening at amazing speed. What we currently have is quite good in my opinion and this is the worst it will ever be, as we’ll have improvements on top of improvements, most apps and lemmy itself are open source, I believe that soon, instead of us feature pairing with reddit, it will be them trying to chase us up.
What's nice to me is that I'm not replying to this on Lemmy. I'm able to use my preferred UI (Kbin) and interact with the same content as everyone else, connecting more people together. It makes it feel more collaborative.
I noticed the same thing about Mastodon vs Twitter. When I visited Twitter I would come away angry. (This was true both pre and post Elon.) When I visited Mastodon I would come away happier and with some interesting ideas. The tone is totally different. I chalk it up to the absence of engagement-maximizing algorithms, which tend to select for toxicity because that's what gets people to spend the most time on the site.
This is a good point. Because even websites which replaced others, oftentimes the older one is still there. Like even Digg still alive after Reddit got more popular. Some people say Tumblr's dead but its really not especially for specific interests like games. The success of you isnt based on the failure of someone else, and its important to remember and not become cross because reddit still has users. Especially its been only like 10 days and a lot have already gone onto other sites.
The success of you isnt based on the failure of someone else
Totally agree. Also, that's just a great wholesome motto for life in general tbh hahah.
We should focus on building the community we want and people will come.
Reddit has given us an incredible head start with the way they handled the API changes.
The people who understood what that meant and decided not to stand for it are the people who came here first. Should be an excellent foundation.
Ok, those places are still "alive", but have you actually gone to them lately? Digg is literally run by an ad bot who creates 99% of posts. You have to search down the list for a post that actually has comments. And of the comments that exist, it looks like a Facebook conversation with a few people, one of which is likely a bot.
Users are the content creators, whether through posts or comments. Pissing off a large portion of them will just leave the ones that don't care about content, they just want something...anything...delivered to them endlessly. If the good users abandon the site, then Reddit will slowly turn into Digg, a link aggregator run by bots serving SEO content to users that contribute nothing more than "nice picture!". And that's really sad when you consider what the place once was...just like it's sad to see Digg now.
I'm not angry with Reddit because it will survive. I'm angry with Reddit because of what I've lost at the hands of management that turned their backs on me. While their are alternatives that cover some of what I've lost, I know I'll never get back some of it.
Digg didn't "die" from a single change. It bled users over the course of multiple changes. The size of the waves was based on how many users were affected. The big wave was when they redesigned the whole interface.
I don't think Reddit is done changing, so we'll see where things go. I know that eventually they'll kill off the old interface, and that will lose a large portion of users as well.
Exactly. People also forget that reddit didn't spring up overnight, and the great digg migration wasn't a one-time en masse thing either. It was a slow bleed for 2~3 years even after digg's v4 redesign. Those that stayed on digg turned it into one huge circlejerk about how reddit sucked and it would never take off, and people would end up back on digg eventually ... EXACTLY like what is happening on reddit now. It will take time for Feddi to grow, but it will as long as dedicated users stick around and create interesting content
If some of the 3rd party app devs convert their reddit apps to fediverse apps, that will really get the ball rolling
Change from RIF to FIF. Sounds great to me.
Especially if the logo is just a blue scribble over the R that turns it to a F
Indeed. These days on any social media, there’s a critical threshold for user generated content creation. Different for every platform and as social media expectations change over time. I think the fediverse has a real shot at sustainable growth thanks to Twitter and Reddit enshittification. Being able to see new content daily or even hourly as a measure of critical mass seems to have been reached here and it’s beautiful to witness!
Lemmy has been around for 4 years compared to Reddit's 18. Compare Lemmy's current state to 2009 Reddit for a somewhat more accurate look.
I joined Reddit in 2011 and Lemmy has a lot of the same feel and the same problems, but is already way ahead of where Reddit was back then. It has me very excited for the future of the internet for the first time in a long while.
A lot of that traffic is people googling something and finding the answer on reddit and then getting on with their lives. it will probably be that way for quite a while.
I hate that I’m still adding to Reddit traffic but every once and a while I still do (search item) + Reddit because it’s still better than just googling something and getting 100 terrible SEO articles about a topic.
For example. I wanted to look for DIY dog toys. I got hundreds of results with crappy clickbait, and ridden websites. Did +Reddit and got some great results.
Once I can do +Lemmy and get decent results my traffic will fall hard… I guess I gotta be part of that change, offering threads of my own with information I know. But it just seems homeless some days.
Honestly, I haven't seen as big of a push for redditors to move elsewhere.
It feels like Plan A was to protest the changes and when that plan didn't work, there was no Plan B in sight. I saw someone suggesting that perhaps, at this point, it would be best to consider moving to another platform but the reality is that outside ModCoord I didn't really see a coordinated effort to do that.
While everyone is likely to suffer in the long-run in terms of the quality of content, outside of losing access to some very cool apps the biggest victims of the whole ordeal have been the mods actually standing up to Reddit's tyrannical behavior.
Reddit is beyond redemption, but for many people reddit is home and the plan now seems to be to comply with the orders and try to keep what semblance of normalcy and power each mod has rather than realizing that the point at which their votes, voices and free labor matter is over.
A lot of sentiment seems to suggest that for Lemmy or the fediverse to succeed Reddit has to fail.
I don't get that opinion at all. Reddit had become overwhelming bloated. A popular thread would have thousands of comments. Most of which would be near identical. Only the most up voted would ever be read and typically they had to have been commented while the thread was new.
The internet is vast, there is plenty of room for multiple social media to exist.
If you dislike what reddit has become then ignore it. If you still wish to use it then you can do so side by side with using Lemmy.
Thousands of comments which the top ones contain the same types of canned, sarcastic answers as well.
The informative & constructive comments are generally way down at the bottom of the thread.
I also feel like, if Reddit died and all the users jumped to Lemmy, Lemmy would die rather quickly as well.
Lemmy still has a long way to go.
It's possible indeed, mostly because of infrastructure and manpower to moderate. Sustainable growth is the best growth
Yeah, I'd rather have a thread with a dozen high quality comments than hundreds of bot reposts/low quality buzzwords. I do hope that Lemmy sustains enough activity to have those nice, small conversations though.
I don't WANT Lemmy to replace Reddit. I hope Reddit continues to serve as a containment board for all the morons who flooded into it over the past few years and share views like "most people use the redesign, its fine" and "Reddit is a company that needs to make money". Let Reddit continue to show them the same 10 /r/funny reposts over and over again while the good part of Reddit's community moves here and recreates the quality community we enjoyed pre 2016.
I think that it's important to note the 1% rule.
Most of the traffic of any given platform will be created by people who interact with it only passively; they mostly lurk and, for good or bad, they don't care about it. Admins this, mods that, who the fuck cares, my cat pics sprout spontaneously from the internet.
In the meantime the people who actually contribute with the platform will be a tiny fraction of it. They don't add traffic, but they add value - because they're the ones responsible for creating the content (posting), aggregating value to the content (commenting), sorting the content (voting and moderating). The admins' decisions and the mod revolts affected specially bad this group. And... well, not even the stupid like to be called stupid, and that's basically what the admins did.
Now consider the link. The lurkers are back to Reddit because there's still content to be consumed there, but eventually it'll run dry - because the contributors are leaving the site. As such, you don't expect the mod revolts to have a short-term impact on the site, but rather a long-term one: the site will become less and less popular over time, as the lurkers are looking for content there and... well, nobody is providing them jack shit. Eventually the site will be forgotten by the masses, just like Digg was.
So Reddit will die, mind you. But it won't be a sudden death; it'll be a slow bleeding.
I just wish that this process was slightly faster, specially before the IPO.
This lurker won't (trying to not lurk here). I am happy to get away from there, enough content (and better quality) is here.
Thank you! (We need more content. Specially about other stuff than Reddit.)
That reminds me a caveat of the reasoning above: the "lurker" and "contributor" aren't different people, but different interactions with a platform. Someone might be a lurker in one platform but a contributor, for example. The conclusion is still the same though, people avoid contributing to platforms that they feel to be hostile towards them.
The content will stay, at least in terms of posts. If the value-adders go to other sites, someone will just repost that value back to reddit.
It'll devolve into something like instagram, where it's literally impossible to discuss anything in the comments. Unfortunately that doesn't mean they stop making money.
The content will stay, at least in terms of posts.
Content loses relevance over time, and becomes increasingly harder to retrieve as noise piles up: pointless threads, re-re-re-reposts, "marketing opportunities" (i.e. spam), so goes on. Reddit Inc.'s actions pissed off specially bad the people who were removing that noise - moderators.
someone will just repost that value back to reddit.
Usually you'd have the contributors doing this; the lurkers don't care about sharing. But even if someone/something (AI) consistently keeps posting stuff from other platforms back into Reddit, those newer posts will be further removed from the original source, and they'll arrive later. Reddit stops being the "front face of the internet" to become "yet another bottom feeder of the internet".
where it’s literally impossible to discuss anything in the comments. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean they stop making money.
In Reddit's case, I think that it does. Reddit might've started as a link aggregator, but its main value was as a forum platform. Without the ability to discuss anything deeper than "two plus two equals GOOD! EDIT WOW THANKS FOR THE GOLD, KIND STRANGER!@!11ONE", it's just yet another link aggregator again.
I agree and those reasons you listed are why I don't have any issue parting ways with this platform, but I don't think the general public does. People do use instagram and tiktok to view what I (and I'm guessing you do too) consider noise.
And after all, the general public is who views the ads on their site and brings in the money.
As someone who spends time curating the content I view without any care given to what other people enjoy, I'm often shocked at how terrible the content on something like youtube's front page is when I get logged out. It's easy to forget that a lot of people just don't care and use the internet to turn off their brain.
You're right that noise is subjective (it might be noise for one, content for another), but it's only partially so. Most people don't like old, repetitive or misplaced content; they don't like spam either, so those things are almost always noise. And yet I think that they'll become more and more common there over time.
You mentioned TikTok and Instagram; that's less about noise vs. content and more about high quality vs. low quality. Plenty people have low standards, but even those prefer quality stuff; so once content quality drops down (I'm predicting that it will), they'll have less reasons to look for content in Reddit instead of elsewhere.
Also, note that 47.58% of the traffic of the site is generated by "organic search". Once creators are gone, those 47.58% are going away, too. They won't be googling stuff like "how to shoot web site:reddit.com" if they know that Reddit will provide mostly junk results.
The comments by people consist of nothing but emojis and occasionally one to five words.
Scattered around that, you'll also find a lot of bots spamming websites that either sell cheap stuff like LED lighting and swamp coolers with ridiculous markups (about 10x) or are straight up scams.
Those could be filtered out easily but instagram just cares more about the traffic than their users.
With moderators leaving en masse, reddit will move into that direction. They won't ever get this shitty, but definitely a lot closer than they are now.
It’s not impossible, just inconvenient. Instagram was made to show off pictures, so when you open someone’s Instagram, all you see is a grid of pictures by default. If you want to read the captions and comment, you have to click on a pic and then click on the 💬 to view the comments and add your own. In a world where most places only make you click “send” to comment, it’s slightly more work than most people want for an online discussion.
eventually it’ll run dry - because the contributors are leaving the site
I somewhat disagree... you haven't considered the increased incentive for occasional posters to become more regular contributors as existing contributors leave.
As the volume of contributions reduces, each contribution is more likely to garner engagement - those sweet sweet endorphins released when someone upvotes or otherwise engages with your post.
Even if it does, it doesn't really matter if Reddit can become profitable.
It doesn't really matter what we think but what the shitty capitalists bearing down on Reddit think. They clearly pushed for it to move into crypto and NFTs and I wouldn't doubt if they push it to chase the next hype of AI. I wouldn't doubt if the restrictions in the API are AI related and Reddit has lots of archived comments and posts to draw from.
If Reddit was actually good at this and had anyone of value in that mass of 2000 employees then AI moderating and posting would already be announced.
That would truly be the end of Reddit, but my god. They could IPO at a quadrillion dollars as all the tech bros fall on top of each other to buy the stock.
Then, a couple of years later when it's terrible and doesn't work at all it will quietly fade away. Just like what's already going to happen, just without the successful IPO.
Lots of people are probably just waiting for better apps for lemmy + the drop dead date for Reddit 3rd party apps. I am, anyway. I'd expect a shift in activity in July.
"Lots" in relation to the Lemmyverse size, but not in relation to the Reddit userbase. This chunk of the Fediverse grew huge in a single month, but it's still considerably smaller than Reddit.
I read there are some issues with pre 0.18 versions of Lemmy with the latest versions of Jerboa. It should be fixed soon though, and an update as big as 0.18 for Lemmy should be rare in the future
Using Jerboa right know. I kinda like it, but compared to Relay for Reddit and so on, it's of course not as polished.
Give it the decade+ that Relay has had to be developed and I bet Jerboa will be really awesome :)
I just saw a post a few above this one listing a bunch of apps being worked on. I know that isn't helpful to you but if I find the post again, I'll link it.
I'm trying Connect right now: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kuroneko.lemmy_connect
I agree in general with you, but AI adds a wrinkle. Wouldn't surprise me at all if AI generated content continues to amuse the casual doomscrollers and reddit serves up a lot of ads to those mindless suckers and makes money for years with that model.
Doesn't hurt us, though. We can move on and do our thing here in the Fediverse.
AI posting + low standards does throw a monkey wrench in my reasoning, but not a big one: that AI will be available first for Alphabet/Google, Microsoft and Meta/Facebook, as they're the ones developing this stuff. And they happen to have services that overlap in functionality with Reddit, at least for people who are fine with AI-generated content.
No offence but I never understand this lurker hate.
Wasnt the hole idea of the web to have a website and be able to share your knowledge? Iam pretty sure that most people would just stop putting out content, if literally no one is reading it.
Just seems wrong to call those visitors of your publicly accessible site/blog/forum/whatever lurkers, or speak of them as if they would steal from your garden.
You're assigning a connotation to the word that I don't really agree with. There's nothing wrong with being a lurker.
There's encouragement to not be a lurker in the fediverse simply because engagement drives adoption and traffic, but I think the goal is ultimately to attract more lurkers
The amount of content I'm seeing over here these days lets me know that despite whatever the numbers tell you reddit lost sizeable amounts of community members and content producers. What these statistics hide is the massive dent in reddits free labor pool of mods that are likely done with the platform.
Lemmy has beyond exceeded my expectations of quantity and quality of content. I will pass by reddit occasionally but its become clear that the Fediverse concept can actually work. It has issues that need to be solved, but the minds behind it are very smart and motivated to find a way to make it keep working. The rate of PR's getting merged into lemmy 0.18 are wild.
The rate of PR’s getting merged into lemmy 0.18 are wild.
don't piss of open-source developers
Yea, same. Really liking the content and friendly atmosphere over here. Looking increasingly viable as a replacement, especially if you believe in quality over quantity.
A ton of current content is produced by spam bots. As I understand it, the new changes will also affect these bots, so curious to see what will happen.
I wouldn't be surprised if they had, actually.
Still, a spam bot can just use the free license - they won't make nearly as much api requests as a proper app would.
The ones that make 60 posts per account per hour are easy to detect no matter how they post.
I'm not surprised, but you can't forget that a lot of people on reddit don't really post or comment a lot. I myself was one of them, I'm way more active here than I ever was on reddit though.
Same.
I feel like the people here are way more open for discourse, which makes it a lot less scary to voice your thoughts.
Still haven't posted anything though, I'm not a conversation starter, but rather a participant. XD
On Reddit if you post anything opposite the hive mind it goes off the rails. If they are talking turkey for thanksgiving and you post ham, the reaction was that as if you murdered their only child.
Here people just ask questions and converse like they normally would in the real world.
The boar’s head in hand bring I,
Bedeck'd with bays and rosemary.
I pray you, my masters, be merry
Quot estis in convivio
Caput apri defero
Reddens laudes Domino
I credit my 12 years on reddit with my ability to create airtight defenses towards anything in my daily life.
Yeah but then you risk looking like you’ve had too many conversations with difficult 12 yr olds among your peers and start missing the overall points of the conversation. Reddit fighting lacks this emotional intelligence. It’s not a good look on adults in adult conversations where not every conversation is a defence but listening. And sometimes it’s just venting where a person might not even be in the right but that’s not what that conversation is about. RL is not about ‘winning’ a conversation as it is on Reddit.
Sure, if you apply it to literally everything, but I meant that it comes in handy when I'm being questioned. The joys of not fitting a stereotype for senior roles in the workplace 🐸
Yeah but you're also also not contributing to the horde of data that they can sell to the AI companies. So your account isn't useful to them.
They are boasting now but they know they're done for.
I can't imagine this stock price is going to be anyway near what they wanted to be when the IPO comes in. Assuming it now happens at all.
Am I the only one who thinks that having only a 7% dip in visits and a 16% reduction in time spent on site is really unusual when over 99% of the site was dark for 48 hours? To me, that suggests that something fucky is going on with the count of real users vs bots on the site.
https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/72348
Based on the numbers in this post it's fair to assume reddit is 90% bots.
And I would really not be surprised, it was so lich repeating same ideas that it was not possible to come from different people.
Huffman has fully torpedoed any credibility he held before this fiasco. I don't trust any statements he could exert influence over.
I think I see the problem. 99% of the site wasn't dark. That reddark site was showing a hand curated list of subs that announced they were going dark, compared to the number of those subs that did go dark. The exact numbers are impossible to track down, but reddit claims they have "100k+" active communities. Less than 10% of reddit actually went dark, conservatively speaking.
Of course, all subs are not created equal, so just comparing sub numbers doesn't tell the whole story, but even anecdotally, my sub list was mostly intact during the blackout.
If they only loose 10% of users or less. That can still be fatal. If they keep the 99% that's lurking but lose the 1% that creates the content. The lurkers will leave eventually. Just slightly delayed. And from what I've seen there's been a lot of content creation and activity here. And plenty of lurking as well. I think the reality is that we won't see the true impact on Reddit for another few months.
I'll be real with you, both of those things are huge for a company as large as reddit. They will obsess over user features that increase attention by just one or two percent. So losing that much traffic is a red alert.
They also will have tracking for number of posts and comments deleted, number of subscriptions lost, users banned, etc. All of those numbers will look awful.
In fact, karma is a really good indicator of what they lose. If you take karma, divide by time since account creation, then you have an excellent measure of engagement with communities. They can see how much karma is being lost. That's why they're afraid.
I'm going to continue using rif until it shuts down at the end of the month but there's no way I'm downloading their shitty app. I have a feeling a lot of people are in the same boat.
Similar for me, but with Relay. I absolutely refuse to use the shitshow that is the official app. And honestly, I've been actively choosing to use Reddit less and less.
Yeah. I'm on vacation anyways, with me minimal cell coverage, so it's been pretty easy, but I've popped in a handful of times. but, there's no way I'm installing their client. None. I don't have Facebook, or Twitters clients, I'll be damned if Im installing reddit.
Pretty much same for me tbh. I'll have to see when it actually happens. But I've been in Lemmy since this all started. And it's clear the content has grown here substantially. To the point where I can scroll and scroll like in reddit. It wasn't like that the first time I got here.
Same here. I'll check out the Fediverse first then go to reddit if I still need to waste time. No point in quitting early. The protests clearly failed so might as well just accept that.
Hopefully their numbers drop dramatically next month.
I am at an over my dead body moment with reddit. I don't care what their numbers say I'm not going back.
I was on that moment for years, just there was no real substitute. Hopefully, lemmy will remain big enough.
I think it will. It's grown a lot and quickly too. I've been constantly keeping an eye on the "new community" communities and have not been disappointed to see all my favorites showing up.
I'm concerned people will get put off by the federation differences. I feel like it will scare people.
It may. It did for me a little bit. Although I would sat since then every article or post I've looked at on this subject has carried some explanation of the form, "There are lots of sites, but they all work together so just join one and explore.", which was my only initial fear.
That's fine. I'm sure the passive masses will show back up.
The real problem is content creators and such are or have already left. And well, I'm here, as are all of you!
Passive consumers are a massive force, and will go where the wind blows. But they actively do little. And, about them... Who cares?
I don't think the content creators really left significantly, but the sentiment to users has certainly changed. This was never going to kill reddit, and was never gonna be a long term problem for them - for that the former mod and activist for r/jailbait was correct. But it creates negative user sentiment, which will make it easier to move people, or even make people just less excited to use the platform in the long term.
I don't think this applies to just people who support the protest either. People who just wanted to see their content and got mad at mods for shutting down subs now have more negative sentiment to the moderators and the users who may or may not support the protests.
This is a W in my books, as I never liked corporate ownership of people having conversations, which is expressly Reddit's sole product. Maybe a few hundred people will use the site less this week than last. Maybe an additional few hundred come the API changes, but the next controversy Reddit has will move more. And it'll snowball, just like Twitter's seen, and the content will change to reflect the worst who decide to stay and support reddit through it all.
But it creates negative user sentiment, which will make it easier to move people, or even make people just less excited to use the platform in the long term.
To add, it's not nothing that lemmy and kbin have grown as much as they have. This has introduced many to the concept of the fediverse at all, or at least to those two names, and they're more likely to switch after they've heard about it a couple times, or after it grows a bit more, or once reddit pisses them off even by just some toxic mod doing dumb shit and making them say "fuck this site, I'm going to that alternative I heard about."
I guess what I'm getting at is this is effective marketing even if we don't make the sale today. Like Hank during Grillstraveganza, you provide quality information and let the customer make up their own mind, and your sales will come in at the end of the month. We don't need all those fancy Jo-Jack tricks to make an immediate sale, we can bide our time like Hank.
I absolutely think that the numbers are correct. If Reddit is a habit for you you will not break it immediately (unless you really dislike the changes). This is just time spent, not how much users enjoy it. And if they don't enjoy the content as much because the quality dropped they will start looking for alternatives. But for most that is a long term thing.
Although not conclusive if you do a Google keyword search for "Reddit alternatives" the numbers go stratospheric in the last 2 weeks.
If people wanting to leave Reddit work normal levels, there wouldn't have been such a huge spike in searches.
I would love to see statistics on OC by account age before the blackout and now.
Everyone who made reddit what it was is gone. Period.
Why are all these posts about reddit being posted to /c/Technology? There are so many dedicated reddit communities. The "news" about whatever is going on (or not) over there doesn't need to keep cluttering up this community.
Especially when they are all the same thing. Either "zomg reddit is removing mods" or "zomg reddit is totally back to normal we promise, please come back if you haven't"
I think people are just choosing the communities with the greatest number of users.
More strict moderation would spread it out, it would think.
Not completely normal. I deleted my account that was old enough to sign up for most websites on its own. I'm not the only one.
Haven't deleted either of both of my 14 yr accounts yet, but I haven't been on Reddit since the blackout and have plans to nuke it all after I navigate new subscriptions and think it through.
FWIW, I find the experience a refreshing re-start, just like when Digg and Slashdot fucked up and I'm already seeing shit posting, memes, and fresh content galore on Lemmy in just the last week. I doubt I'll go back to Reddit except for some esoteric solutions that I find in searches.
I'm not planning on deleting mine, I do have some good technical answers on my account that I don't want to delete. I figure stopping participating is more important than going back and deleting it.
10 years for me and not been on the weekend before the protest and have no plans to return anytime soon. But when I do it will be to gain as much that I saved as I can and then nuke my account from there. And I have 150k in karma. Doesn't seem like much but took me a long time to earn that and I was proud of it. But when RIF goes I am gone.
Long live Lemmy, long live the fedverse.
Haven't fully deleted mine yet, but I'm already using it a lot less. Lemmy is more than good enough for bathroom scrolling and I've actually gone back to reading books before bed. Just finished one yesterday.
Also deleted the 3 accounts I had - it's most like a paid ad. People need to stop giving two shits about Reddit, it's a corporation that doesn't care about its users yet a bunch of its users, even former ones, seem to overly care about it.
And my axe.
Yep that's a reddit throwback but I deleted my 14yo account 2 weeks ago and have actively avoided them since.
I know that is bs because I haven't been there in days and I probably added 100 visits a day to their stats. So they're at least a couple hundred shy. Suck my balls spez.
When Reddit protests were at its height, posts to the site dropped by only 20%. Who is doing the majority of the posting?
I am sure some of it is spam bots. But also - a big value of Reddit is indeed in the long tail of niche communities. Many did not join the protest.
Using bots to replace users-lost-to-protest has always been the goal. All that matters is that the numbers go up.
This is good for the sale (IPO).
Twitter had the same plan--keep counting bots. Elon (or some advisor on his team), rightfully argued this point and eventually it lead to a lawsuit, that was then settled out of court.
Google and facebook have been selling "ad impressions" of questionable human-ness for decades. None of these sites have any real incentive to find out how many bots are on their platform.
Bots mostly. Take a look at the site, you'll notice many usernames consisting of a random adjective or noun in front of a random noun and a random number at the back. Sometimes they are in camel case, sometimes they are separated by dashes or underscores.
Go to the profiles of those. Bot accounts display that they are 6-12 months old and have no activity for the first few months. The activity starts with out-of-place comments on reposts made by other users (they never comment on OC), so they are likely copied from other users that commented below the original post.
After the initial commenting phase, they start posting. It's never OC, just reposts and they never reply to questions in the comments.
At this point I'm convinced those bots are deployed by reddit themselves because they are so easy to spot and no action is taken against them.
Then there's also the porn bots which collect properly tagged material from other sites and post it to the corresponding subreddits. You can spot them by looking at their profiles, they post 20-30 images an hour without pause. I'm pretty sure those are made by users, we'll see once the API changes go live.
Edit: Typos
Take a look at the site, you'll notice many usernames consisting of a random adjective or noun in front of a random noun and a random number at the back. Sometimes they are in camel case, sometimes they are separated by dashes or underscores.
That's the format of the usernames that Reddit suggests. That doesn't really mean much.
Yes, that's why you need to check the profiles and look for the criteria I listed.
I remember just one time where I falsely accused someone to be a bot based on that and I've done it about a hundred times.
It always struck me as odd that so many users on Reddit were using the default generation scheme. No other site I've been on has so few people caring about the name they pick
There are all kinds of useful named things to learn about.
Tumblr is still alive, but it's a shell of what it used to be. Given the behavior of Spez, it's only a matter of time before Reddit ends up the same.
Imagine the kinds of fuckery that will happen when Reddit has shareholders.
There's been discussions about Tumblr getting on ActivityPub which would be interesting.
Tumblr has at least managed to carve out an interesting little niche for itself at this point.
the people still on reddit after the 30th when the third party apps close down, i personally believe can stay there indefinitely. these people, and i, do not exist on the same wavelength.
Only reason I'm still checking reddit is because RIF is still working. After that, I'll see how much I miss it.
Yup, following up on some good comments and discussions I had, watching people migrate and just moving away from reddit completely over the next week.
People are still replying to me, and good posts are still going up. But in 6 days I will no longer be able to access it so here I am.
I've been slowly trying to transition to Lemmy with this in mind. After June 30th, RIF won't be working and I don't plan on installing the official app so I'm trying to get adjusted to Lemmy before then.
I definitely agree. The vast majority of people still left on Reddit are those who are corporate bootlickers and those who do not care and just want to doom scroll.
Neither type adds anything to an online community
I don't agree that the vast majority of the people left there are bootlickers.
Most of the people left there seem to be uninterested in technology from the arts and crafts related subs and that's what's really missing in Lemmy/kbin.
There is no /c/woodwoking, /c/printmaking or /c/embroidery and the people that usually visit these don't really care about the underlying tech. Most of the time they just want to share their crafts with their community and things to just work.
I'm almost certain I've seen a woodworking community when browsing all.
I also don't think it's necessarily a question of subject matter so much as that Lemmy's user base is simply not large enough yet to sustain active niche communities, and it's an open question if we can get to that point without degrading the quality of the less focused ones, like /c/crafting or /c/diy.
Will a critical mass be reached where we can create our own communities? At least at beehaw that seems to be handled top down, we had a poll asking what we'd want - does it work that way everywhere? I'd like a local area community, but as you say, who'd participate? I might be it.
I found these using the communities search on the site. I don't know if you can find them using Jerboa or not as it's currently crashing on startup for me (it still needs to bake, methinks).
Woodworking Quite a few choices. Top one has the most subscribers. https://lemmy.world/c/woodworking@lemmy.ca https://lemmy.world/c/woodworking https://lemmy.world/c/woodworking@kbin.social https://lemmy.world/c/bodgers@lemmy.ml https://lemmy.world/c/beginner_woodworking@lemmy.ml https://lemmy.world/c/woodworking@lemmy.ml
Printmaking Only one subscriber at the moment. https://lemmy.world/c/printmaking@lemmy.ml
Embroidery A few choices. https://lemmy.world/c/lemmy_stitch@sh.itjust.works https://lemmy.world/c/embroidery https://lemmy.world/c/embroidery@discuss.tchncs.de
There is definitely still a lack of content, but niche communities are still a thing here in the fediverse, though most are still quite small and you have to search for them. I think that the content will come as long as we keep evangelizing about the fediverse.
Also, this is my first post on Lemmy!
I am not sure I believe that, it might be that bots can be active again now that the subreddits are reopened, but I know that I am not back. And I won't be back, and I think a lot of people are staying away as well. That the traffic is now normal seems a bit sketchy.