Last month marked the official end of the Reddit protests. Any subreddit that had changed its rules or gone dark ā or forced its users to post exclusively about John Oliver ā has now gone back to normal. On the surface, it seems like a complete victory for Reddit, but things arenāt so simple when a major element of that victory was forcibly removing moderators for dozens of communities. In fact, according to Reddit users, the protests have caused a major brain drain on the site. The question is: can you prove it? And the answer is: well, sort of, yes.
For the last six months, weāve been tracking the top Reddit posts every month. When we first started, the subreddit with the most posts in the top 20 was r/OddlySatisfying, with three posts. As of last month, however, 10 of the top 20 posts all came from r/MadeMeSmile.
The fact that all of the top posts on Reddit are coming from the same subreddit, as far as weāre concerned, means either people arenāt browsing as much or there just arenāt as many people on Reddit. But it was hard to tell which was which, since the actual number of upvotes on the most popular posts are pretty identical to where they were six months ago. But investigating that, I found that Reddit has always had certain caps on how many upvotes a post can get, which suggests that isnāt a good way to measure. Over on Subreddit Stats, however, we found a much better way of working this out.
Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they arenāt coming back.
This chart from SubredditStats show the daily comments and posts for 5 major subreddits: r/news, r/facepalm, r/mademesmile, r/oddlysatisfying, r/mildlyinfuriating.
And thatās how weāve now ended up with a Reddit full of r/MadeMeSmile. And, just in case youāre curious about what that looks like ā four of the top five Reddit posts were reposted TikToks.
Reddit was one of the last major spots online where you could expect to interact with people who arenāt making money off you. Which also why Reddit was able to completely replace its existing moderators since they were virtually all unpaid.
Weāve talked a lot about Cory Doctorowās concept of āenshittificationā, but he was only talking about individual platforms. Larger trends like AI and crypto (or even pivoting to video) have a cascading effect on the process. One big platform trying something is enough to legitimize it, and soon everywhere you can go has a noticeably worse user experience. If people stay off Reddit, then the site definitely didnāt āwinā the protests, but neither did anyone else.
When Reddit announced the API pricing that kicked all this off, they justified it by talking about lucrative AI tools trained on Reddit data, saying, āwe donāt need to give all that value to some of the largest companies in the world for freeā. Ironically, thatās exactly what you do every time you go online, and it looks like a lot of people have decided to choose the same thing for themselves by staying off Reddit.
Iāll argue that people that left Reddit for better places did win. Lemmy itself is less susceptible to corporate BS shoved at end users.
Iām on Kbin, and feel that this shift is a majorly positive one for me both in short and hopefully in long term. I had two accounts, and one became a much more active than the other over the course of about 12 years. I dlād my content, erased it, and left without looking back. Iāve used the more obscure acct to check on things a few times, but really donāt have time for that. Onward! Weāve got a Fediverse to build!
Similar here, I actually comment occasionally. More than that, Iāve gone back to self hosting multiple things, Iāve shifted away from Google, all good changes I think. Prompted by reddit changing the api price, who would have thought theyād have such a positive influence on me.
I wonder how many people, like me, ended up drastically reducing their social media use altogether, at long last. I still pop in here now and again, but Iām not spending anything like the amount of time I spent on reddit.
Reddit became a significant time sink for me. Iād already backed away from FB and IG. Kbin seems a better fit for me, and itās a customizable fit. Yay!
@Lowbird me as well! a good thing!
@Arotrios @atlasraven31