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.
- 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.
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 23 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
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.
- 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.
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!
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.
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.
If some of the 3rd party app devs convert their reddit apps to fediverse apps, that will really get the ball rolling
- Sync is coming!
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.

Agreed. To me, Lemmy (or the fediverse for that matter) succeeded because it offered me an alternative to reddit. It doesn't need to become the #1 to be worth something.
- Lemmy is #1 in my heart
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.
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.
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 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.
- Never used Instagram; why is it impossible to discuss anything there?
Hey, the repost bots will still be there :-D !
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.
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.
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

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
- The reddit hivemind would do that to you
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 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.

On June 12, 2023, nothing happened on Reddit ~~Square~~ Forum. The so called "Moderator Purge" is a hoax invented by communist/fascist Lemmy propagandists. Reddit is a great platform, the best on the entire world wide web. Lemmy is a backward spam-filled/virus-infested/ad-ridden website filled with communists and fascists. Long live ~~Chairman~~ CEO Spaz.

There is no war in Ba Sing Se.
I didn't know Winnie the Poo had a son named Spaz. Long live chairman Poo Spaz. May he forever ride hard on the magical head of a nuclear north Korean unicorn.

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 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.

Enjoying the last week of Apollo, greatest app of all time!
- RIP Apollo :-( Reddit died for me when they killed it
- Sync >> Apollo
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.
Indeed
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.

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.
- Yeah I'd much rather be here watching it grow than on Reddit watching it die
- 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.
- Somehow I doubt the actual spambots have applied for a developer API key. They'll be fine.

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.

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.
Mine was 8 years old and I haven't touched it since the protests started
- I deleted mine after that disastrous AMA that the head spaz put on. What a shit show.
- 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.

"Returns to normal"... minus one user.

And my axe.
Yep that's a reddit throwback but I deleted my 14yo account 2 weeks ago and have actively avoided them since.
Make that 2...
- Make that 3…
Make that 2...

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.

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.

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.
The article mentions 55.31 million daily visits (average). You decreased their stats by 0.00018%. Even if all new active lemmy users had your level of activity, the other site would still return to normal. There are just so many other users.

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.
- 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.
Some of them will just be using reddit on a computer, not a mobile device. To someone who has never used a third-party app, they might not seem very important.
- Even on mobile I always just used the desktop version of (old) Reddit. I just love seeing the fediverse prosper.

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.
- camel case
  TIL this has a name. love it
A lot of people simply don't give a shit. Look at the amount of people still on Facebook.
- I'm only on Facebook for local town news 😭

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.

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.
I'm afraid that's just bubble bias. Most people just don't care or haven't found a viable alternative yet. These +43k active users on Lemmy are huge for Lemmy, but not even a scratch for the other site.
After the initial exodus at the start of this month, you could see more and more comments demanding returning to business as usual.
- [I’m afraid that’s just bubble bias.] Huh, hadn't heard of that one before. But yeah 43.000 is not a lot next to 52.000.000. I am still staying here tho
If Reddit experience a drop a 5% of its user base I doubt they would immediately notice. And even if they did sites like this (pcmag) would not consider that a major drop and so wouldn't even report it as such.
But we all know that 5% of the users produce 90% to the content.
It's interesting to see how the traffic is after 1st of July. I hate to speculate but I wouldn't be surprised when an article will comes out, stating traffic has not changed after 1st of July.
NGL, I'm only there for the porn now
- Yeah, didn't find any equivalent on lemmy so far...

Reddit bots and AI have returned Reddit traffic to Normal. They don't need no stinkin' human users causing problems.

The reddit bots have returned. Nature is healing.

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.
- Activitypud? Does that mean they can connect to us? Or something
Tumblr has at least managed to carve out an interesting little niche for itself at this point.

Don't know about you all, but I will continue to check reddit until Sync for reddit stops working. On July 1st, if it's no longer working, reddit is gone.

I used to use reddit many times a day and now at most once a day... I use https://old.reddit.com
Just patch it with revanced to work for the foreseeable future. That's what I'm planning to do.
- How would that make it work after the loss of API access?

Until the 30th, then we'll see who actually leaves

This is an important point, the death of 3rd party apps should in theory make at least a dent in user numbers on reddit.
I haven't been back since the blackout, but I'm waiting until July 1st to delete my post and comment history.

Without my daily traffic that's a fact.... Haven't been back there now for 3 to 4 weeks and was a daily consumer / contributor. My relationship with Reddit has ended and zero intention of going back. I have drawn my line in the sand and I'm not supporting the recent shenanigans ! They can kiss my ass.

My guess is that Reddit loses about 5% of traffic by shutting off API access. It isn't great, but it isn't bad either. Spez treats it as a win.
Mod burnout becomes a big thing in a year, with many major subs starting to lock threads and blanket ban harder as the more experienced mods leave and the new set isn't really prepared to handle the workload. A lot of the best of this new block are going to be alt-right, and you'll slowly see subs become more friendly to alt-right views. Mod abuse gets a lot worse.
As the entire site becomes r/conservative, expect the fights that happened with r/The_Donald to be worse and make the site more unusable. This will probably drive off more users as "everything is political". Reddit won't keep its promises on building better mod toolkits, and a lot of LBGT groups leave for other sites.
As the website starts to see a shrinking user base and still hasn't made money, either Spez or a successor goes full Twitter Musk and cuts staff to the bone in hopes of trying to keep some revenue.
- Good observation about how enshittification tends to come with a drift to the far right. At the moment one of the refreshing things about Lemmy is that you can have a discussion in peace without all those people piling in. I hope this can last.
Enshitification doesn't happen over night. It might be months before the needle moves. Platforms die because users seek alternatives, but everyone has a different threshold for when they decide to jump ship. Most people just are not paying attention and will only leave when they experience the shit of Enshitification first hand.
And that hasn't happened on Reddit. Yet...
- July 1st will probably bring another bunch of people across.
- I also think reddit is still the overwhelmingly greatest source of human-written information and discussion on the planet. That will take a while to replace.
  I have tried googling for things without adding on "reddit" these past two weeks, and it's... not good.
- Twitter had to kill 3rd party apps twice in order for the mastodon migration to happen. First they did it in 2011 and then again after Elon bought the company.
  I imagine a true Twitter > Mastodon level migration away from Reddit won't happen yet. But once they inevitably dump old.reddit.com, it might.

I left and haven't logged in for a few weeks now, so I know at least my traffic is gone.

same. I've 100% switched to Lemmy for browsing; keep subscribing to more communities. it feels perfectly complete.
however... my google searches still take me to reddit... ugh sucks that all that 'user knowledge' is stuck there.
I left but logged in to see if my deleted post and comments were restored. Some of them were restored so I edited them to nonsense
- I never said anything of value, ao I left all my comments.

I deleted everything and I've not been on for weeks now. Good riddance!

Check that they didn't un-delete your comment. It happends to me and I had to delete everything again 🤬
- I've manually edited a bunch of my comments. I haven't deleted them yet. I hope it's more permanent.

This article will age poorly in a week. And like milk in about a month.

I don't think so. Most people really are normies and don't care. If there's any change it will happen slowly as Reddit's content and culture go to shit.
- Pretty much, yeah.
Speaking of which, has /r/agedlikemilk come to Lemmy?
Ticktock... The 1st of July is almost here.

I'm only using Reddit to check in on things until the 1st.

Sure, the party won't stop, but the fun people already left, they are here!

We made our own reddit, with blackjack and hookers!
- So... Just so I know to not sub to them, which communities are the blackjack and hookers in? Asking for a friend.

I see an awful lot of people here who have quote left reddit, and yet they still go back to Reddit every day to see what's going on, or to grab popular posts so they can repost it here and try to get imaginary points or something. All they're really doing is helping inflate metrics like this.

Alternatively, they give Reddit one users worth of ads to make Lemmy a better alternative. I think many will continue using Reddit but attempt to reduce the usage (especially once 3PA are blocked). That means once you run out of content on Lemmy, you switch to Reddit. So more content on Lemmy means less time on Reddit.
The simple truth is that there are communities on Reddit that I care more about than about the API changes. And for those I will continue using Reddit until an alternative exists. So it is a gradual change for me and everyone that helps moving the good content to Lemmy helps me indirectly.
I guess it comes down to whether you consider highly upvoted content good content, especially when it comes to memes etc.
- This here. I still check Reddit regularly, but I’m mostly just checking in on a handful of communities, not nearly as much engagement as last month, so if daily active users is their metric then I guess I haven’t moved the needle, but if it’s about actual API usage, number of posts viewed, votes given, comments made, etc. it’s probably 5-10% of what it used to be.
- Good points. Everyone's in there own place with rhe whole Reddit thing. I shouldn't assume I know whatt people are thinking. Except Spez. Fuck u/spez.
I believed the same, but in /r/piracy have seen people helping those inquiring about what lemmy is and how to get set up getting help. I thought it wouldn't help, but people visiting reddit from lemmy are actually assisting reddit users who need help moving. It isn't just meme posting going inside the comments themselves.
- Right on. I hear you.

I haven't been on Reddit much since the protests started, and won't be on it once Sync for Reddit stops working.

Yea, same. The protests were enough to get me to delete my main account and spend no more than 5 minutes a day on Reddit, whereas before this I probably spend 2-3 hours a day on it. Nowadays channeling all my energy into Lemmy. Really liking the content and friendly atmosphere over here!

I don't think most people understand the protests. I had to explain it to two people who use the platform.

I'm not really surprised, I'd actually assume that sexy John Oliver and the other protests created a lot of additional traffic. People post like crazy and a lot of people want to see that, especially since it got some coverage on news sites. Add to that the big majority of people who do not care (remember that 80% of traffic was still reached) plus some who may have been sympathetic enough to join the two day protest but don't care enough to continue to stay away. It's really not surprising that we're back to normal numbers.

Thankfully this isn't the only impact people currently still make, so this isn't over. The real question now will be how else it might change Reddit.

Protesting Reddit by posting entertaining content to Reddit makes as much sense as protesting Bud Lite by buying lots of it to destroy in a high-profile stunt.
- I think it's a little different, but not by much. Yes, it still contributes content and drives users to the site but it's not content they're looking for and it's inevitably going to die down and that's the part I'm looking forward to.
I don’t really get how people think Reddit
is winning. Sure traffic is back to normal or even higher, but that really doesn’t matter. They want to go public and for that to work they have to be lucrative for advertisers.
No one in their right mind wants to advertise like normal on current Reddit. Sure they still have users but now you advertisements are not targeted and you basically advertise on a shitpost site.
From a money perspective this is a huge problem for Reddit because for a investor in the current market situation that is not rly something you want to invest in. Remember it is a forum that hasn’t made a profit in nearly 20 years and a relevant percentage (active posters) of the userbase is trolling right now.
It currently looks like a lose lose situation (Reddit and the users don‘t get what they want).

maybe i'll use the web version for some time, not gonna use their app for sure

Firefox mobile + ublock origin is a powerful combo
- They've been more annoying about "convincing" ~~forcing~~ you to use their shitty app though.

I look up my acct and see my deleted comments and posts being magically revived. Did screen caps of most of it and it is definitely a real thing. Is that a metric for traffic?

Depending on where you live isn't this a violation of our right to privacy? At least in the EU.
- California I believe also has the right to be digitally forgotten.
- Only when requested via special form I believe.
  I should prepare a guide on how to take your data with you when quitting Reddit.
  For instance when you want to be able to prove that it's your account without disclosing your legal name publicly on Reddit you may use keyoxide.org for cryptographic proof. I think I'll talk to keyoxide folks about a method of obfuscating those proofs so they are harder for Reddit to systematically delete.
  I understand not everyone will be willing to go to court for this, but at this point I want enough of us to be able to to get them fined enough for every platform to notice.
Worth checking out:
https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit
It also has the ability to wipe your GDPR data for those in the EU.
As @JapanStar49 said, mass edit, don't mass delete. IMO this is just as good as a greasemonkey script at mass editing your history to remove your reddit paper trail.

As I expected.

I'm not sure it it's just Reddit that makes me sick, or Google. It's the way that society is getting dumber and more subservient.

I definitely get angry when I hear people are 'googling' everything they want to 'search' for. Similarly that people simply wish to protest Reddit - when they don't really care, they're just jumping on the RANT bandwagon.

With the advent of instant gratification, smartphones/internet access, I welcome the lack of need for a paper dictionary.

However, people go further - they love the way the big tech can aggregate their content and dish it up to them.

They don't care that they are being spoonfed solent green, and increasingly denied the ability to find actual answers to their questions.

If you do disturb them, like a borg they will become disoriented. They start to drown until they can feel the comforting caste of blue light on their faces as they dive back into their familiar environment.

Reddit's CEO is not stupid - he knows that most of it's users are sheep, and the escapees will be a minority. The mods, addicted to their power trips, will return and take whatever shit they have to... what else is their life good for?

Reddit is not 'crushing' the protests. The protests were mostly a flash in the pan - now most folks got bored, and just wanna go back to reading their joke of the day.

Moving Forward

A couple of problems. Firstly, even if I've been talking on Fediverse somewhere about a topic - if I search that topic, it will not take me to the Fediverse - I get taken to Reddit.

Unless the Fediverse content is getting included in search engine data, it'll never be driven from that direction.

I know personally that the reason I created my Reddit account is that I would find answers there, and then end up discussing them where I found them.

i try to push back against this notion when i see it: misanthropy is not the proper response here. people aren't sheep, they aren't stupid, they just aren't living in the same context as we are. for a lot of people (and a lot of older people especially), the politics of the internet are a black box, not because they're too stupid to comprehend this stuff, but because its simply out of scope for what they want to achieve online. there's tons of things to care about, and while the internet is a pretty important thing to care about in modern life in my opinion, lots of people simply don't live enough of their lives online to give a shit.
i dunno, i just get kinda pissed off with the whole "sheeple" bullshit. not everybody has your priorities, and not everybody knows what you know. that doesn't make them bad people, or stupid people, or subservient people, it just makes them people.
- Most people, by default, are not sheep; you are not wrong about this. But most people have allowed themselves to be domesticated as if they were (relevant thread attached at bottom).
  this is not a "we are forcing normal people to understand scary programming things" problem.
  this is a "corporations are doing everything to make people so strongly anti-learning and so against trying new things that they voluntarily refuse to use anything except for their own product" problem
  source: https://eldritch.cafe/@AgathaSorceress/109296512790347301

This doesn't surprise me. Most people don't have the time or desire to keep up with tech news, and they just want to feed their addiction. It'll be interesting to see what happens 1~2 weeks after the new API rules are active, and people realize the app they use no longer works.

I never created a Reddit account, and only visited under duress, so I'm not really affected by this. So I'm just cooking up popcorn & watching the show.

Did anybody seriously expect anything different?

This site is the real difference. Lemmy had 0 activity until now. Now that there's a footing, there's a real chance of continued growth.
- From Lemmy perspective there's been a huge influx of new users, but from Reddit perspective nothing changed. I do expect Lemmy to keep growing, but I don't expect that it's going to have any measurable impact on Reddit in the foreseeable future.
There may be some impact, come July, when the third party apps stop working. However, I have to imagine that the vast majority of mobile users use the official app. Quality may take a hit, with the loss of some mods and mod tools, but Reddit will be just fine. Sadly, Reddit rates too highly on content, users, and resultant utility (for many communities) for most users to completely abandon it.
- Reddit rates too highly on content
  But who provides the content? Power users. Reddit follows the same curve as most social media where only like 1-5% of the users actually post the content, and the rest are consumers. When the content creators are gone, it's just a platform with no content.
  The only people who will stick to submitting content are the poor content reposters or various spammers, which the mods have been doing free labor to filter out. Heck, even the bots using the API will die too, so all you'll have is the TOS-breaking bots posting content.
  This will not end well when third party apps are gone. I didn't realize it myself, but most of my time is reading Reddit when I'm bored in bed, or on the train, on my phone. I've been a redditor for 17 years, and my time now has mostly shifted from my desktop to the "RIF" Android app, and without that, I'm simply not using Reddit, and have already uninstalled.
- I wonder if there are metrics anywhere about percentage of mobile users using the official app vs 3rd party apps. I'd be interested to see the breakdown.
- Right, I expect most people will grumble but then just use the official app. You're completely right that the network effects make it difficult for people to move to a different platform, and that outweighs the inconvenience of using the official app.

My first reaction was one of questioning the statistics.

Then I realized that the way they were generating their stats wouldn’t have counted me for the most part.

Then I realized that I wasn’t really all that unique; most power users wouldn’t have shown up in those stats.

At that point, the stats made more sense.

Can you elaborate on how they get those metrics?
- It explains in the article. Found the redditor xD.
  But yeah looks like daily unique visitors and average visit time, which was around 8 minutes apparently. (rookie numbers psh)

Oh, man, I'm sure the traffic is up... It took me FOREVER to delete all my comments and posts across 18 accounts. That 5 second lockout on API calls is a total bitch!

I also wonder how much of the traffic is people archiving Reddit. I've been running it almost continuously for about a week.
- Not to mention all the journalists scouring the site for stories and onlookers checking out the dumpster fire.

I'm not sure daily users is the metric we should be looking at here. How many users are logging on just to vote to close down a sub or post shit in protest?

I've probably used it daily since the blackout ended. But it's maybe 5 minutes and then I'm back here on lemmy.
Whereas before I was spending an unhealthy amount of time there

I wonder if editing/deleting comments counts as "traffic".

I imagine it does. You’re still signing in and interacting with the platform, so it still likely counts.
I feel like “traffic” is also easy to fake. People can drum up an army of new bots and suddenly the “traffic” is back, even if actual people aren’t.

Time to just look to the future. reddit will have a lot of traffic for a long time because of it's huge footprint. So instead of making posts and engaging there, bring good content to Kbin and the fediverse.

Make it so useful and interesting that the good traffic starts to divert.

There are still some niche subs that didn't come to lemmy that I engage in, but I spend more time on Lemmy now than I do on reddit. I think there are probably dozens of us like that. So while I might still show "traffic" I'm not spending near as much time as I did on it and since reddit is trying to go public they wont publish that little fact.
Anyone can buy an article, so I expect to see more of these "everything is just hunky dory at reddit" articles because again they have profit motive.
Meanwhile lemmy grows and grows. Hopefully people continue to engage over here to keep it interesting.

Im commenting before reading: I wonder if traffic'll go up a lot from r/place tomorrow. I dont plan to participate know some ppl even who are staying away from Reddit plan to participate in r/place to put a protest message. But what I wondered if Reddit trying to ensure the mothly activity for June look the same as other months so the dip was not so noticeable. But how much does activity usually increase when r/place happened before? (If at all)

But ik also some ppl said theyre leaving Reddit June 30th, so maybe itll look different then.

Large communities organizing for r/place to discuss what they'll paint is probably a lot of traffic.
I'm sure that most of the mods that haven't been removed yet have some plans for r/place to really fuck with the admins
I think it'll end up with admins skipping the 5 minute timer and banning users that draw over the flags representing those admins' political opinions, just like last year. But the admins have made enemies now so the outcry will be much bigger.
I'll personally going to participate and try to get myself banned without breaking any rules and if that happens, I'll make sure to post about it. Let's hope the front page will be filled with posts of that.
r/place Outside of april fools ?!?
Dang, they must be DESPERATE
What's going on with /r/place?
Wait they're doing place again? Not in April? That definitely strikes me as desperate to juice the numbers like you said

Now that i read it: i saw some ppl here wonder about bots posting comments or maybe downvoting, bc of apparently a lot of comments being against the protest suddenly more than before? And more downvotes on comments about it? If really bots are being used for this, will that also contribute to the traffic metric like a normal user would?

But that said im not sure if theyre bots, but i did see some people mentioned that they thought there's some false accounts speaking on Reddit's side.

You take away power users and people fed up with Reddit and the casual user who doesn't care is left over.
If you look at blackout votes it was usually around 4 to 1 in favor.
During and shortly after the blackouts there were a ton of upset casual users calling the mods cunts, the blackouts don't help, stop holding other users hostage, give me back my content!!!
Those users don't care about third party apps, mod tooling and so on, they just want to browse the site. These angry users got the loudest while protestors took a break or left for the Fediverse.
There's a curious sameness to many of the anti-protest comments. If it's not a bot, it's a group of people working off the same script.
The .world instance has a lot of people with issues that have been kicked off of other instances and they are here
- The point made is that it would be bots used by Reddit to trigger tracking specifically to inflate stats.

I'm pretty sure i'm gone

Well I'm just loading up Lemmy for the first time today and this seems like a fine replacement — even more so than mastodon was for Twitter.

Cool

I think it's par for the course for user traffic to normalize since the platform gets visitors just by simply existing.

But if they actually matched that against old users of the site, then it actually means something. Most of the users that left are usually power users and have used Reddit long enough to use third-party apps and can't stand the bullshit changes.

What fraction of that traffic is from bots or trolls?

I've only entered reddit this week when i was looking something up on search engines, but its hard to go around the content they've build up over the past 15 or so years. And i mostly did this on desktop where i can block all those filthy ads.

For my day to day, i've completely migrated to lemmy. I've enjoyed seeing it grow these past few days and I hope it continues to do so.

Same, just today I had a problem in a niche hobby and I couldn't find a solution. The only answer I found was an old post on Reddit with three comments. Sometimes there just isn't a good alternative.

"Corporate Reddit has control over the platform."

The owner of a centralized platform always has total control of it. Anything else is an illusion.

Not too surprising, sadly :/

CEOs are the dictators of centralized online communities, and act as such. And it kind of works, just like in real life.

I've reduced my usage to 3 subreddits also specifically to do with living in Japan. There's just nowhere else with this info or discussion and people are just not presently interested in moving over here. I mostly lurk (between two reddit accounts (I nuked my online presence because of a stalker and took most of a year off all social media), I had something like 13 years on reddit and maybe 20 submissions), so it's not like I'm producing alluring content on those places.

I also don't use facebook, meta, instagram, twitter, tiktok, etc. which further reduces any interaction I might have.

EDIT: also having to deal with government, legal, visa, etc. things are not fun when little to none is in English (and that which is in English is out-of-date) and a lot of the characters and grammar are not in the standard set. Living and working in another language and culture is also not without its own difficulties and having people to talk to is important. For further info on just the language, 2 sets of characters containing roughly 50 symbols each are required (not hard), and then you need at least 2100 Sino-Japanese characters (kanji) just to be able to read a newspaper. That doesn't include a lot of jargon used in legal, medical, and other things. I wonder if my downvoter /u/Veraxus has ever had deal with anything like this. I can speak conversational Japanese, know a lot of IT jargon, and can somewhat read Japanese and it's still very difficult at times.

- Good question! "Standard" In terms of characters refer to the 常用漢字 which are the -er- "basic" 2160ish (I will try to remember to update with the exact figure; it was expanded in the last 5-10 years) kanji that are the basis to be considered "literate".
  To look at it a bit different for Americans (which is the only basis I have; other counties even within English differ), one could think of reading at an X-grade level. Many publications can be around 5th-grade level (though this comes with its own can of worms).
  In English, we have 26 letters of the alphabet. I guess we could call it 52 differentiation lower- and upper-case. We could also double that to 104 for cursive. If we're feeling generous, we could add a couple of shorthand signs (such as an & that is more shorthand).
  Now, for japanese, in addition to those 104ish, you now have to learn at least 2160ish Chinese characters (and, if you're japanese, all the latin alphabet as described above, but this isn't applicable to those of use whom are native English speakers looking to learn Japanese).
  And, until here, we're only talking about the squiggles used to represent sounds. After this, we actually get into things like vocabulary and grammar and registers ( think something like manners.
  Edit: oh! And those 2160isj characters! Unlike Chinese or something, they can have multiple readings (pronunciations) based on whether they are alone, in a compound, a person's name, etc. Some knaji have over 10 readings. Much like many languages, the most-used words and grammar patterns are the most irregular.

I think traffic is gonna plummet after June 30th. A lot of people are still using Apollo, Sync, etc. like business as usual, but once they stop Reddit will probably take another hit.

Possibly. However, it would be really interesting to see how many download the official app. Personally, the telemetry and ads are enough to keep me away, but I fully understand people, who say that Lemmy's content just isn't there yet.

The people who continue to say “I’m just on Reddit because ___ but as soon as ___ I’m out” were\are honestly part of the problem.

This is expected but I think we'll see be seeing more "lower quality" submissions.

Kinda expected this to happen.

Knew it

I’m still using it while I get used to Lemmy. As soon as Apollo does, I won’t be able to anymore.

I will believe it when I see it. Keep drifting racers

.