- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
SimilarWeb has just released traffic estimates for June. According to these estimates, Reddit’s traffic has seen a 3.36% month-over-month decrease.
For comparison, here’s how traffic has changed for other popular social networking websites:
- Discord.com: +0.51%
- Twitter.com: -1.65%
- Instagram.com: -1.35%
- Facebook.com: -3.18%
- TikTok.com: +0.77%
- Pinterest.com: -2.27%
- Youtube.com: -2.02%
Source: https://www.similarweb.com/website/reddit.com/#overview
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On the one hand, this doesn’t seem like a lot. But on the other, this is just for June. A lot of people left or drastically cut down their usage at the very end of June, and we’re not seeing this reflected in the data yet.
Even so, no company wants to say they’ve lost 3% of their customers. With 1.7 billion total, that’s still 51 million people. It’s a notable loss, especially for a company trying to become profitable and have an IPO.
I used Apollo right up until it shut down, and I haven’t touched Reddit since. I’m guessing I’m not the only one.
Wefwef all the way now
I downloaded Memmy yesterday, and so far I like it.
Memmy ist really awesome! Intuitive, fast, great looks! Love itt!
And it is officially on the App store now!
It’s absurd just how good wefwef is as a web app. Such a natural transition from Apollo.
Since I’m here, RIP Apollo and thanks for all the hard work Christian!
WefWef on the desktop and Memmy for Lemmy on the phone…
I was also an enthusiastic Apollo user.
Other than Lenny, do you replace Reddit with anything else? This thread we’re in now is an exception - there are a lot of posts here. But most threads on Lemmy are pretty empty.
Thats why its up to all of us to start participating.
Protip: If you really want to start a conversation/get engagement, follow Cunningham’s Law:
the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.
So, fill those empty posts with confidently incorrect statements and watch that comment section fill up as people rush in to correct you.
Actually, Cunningham’s Law says nothing of the sort. If you look at the source material as I have done - and in the original Phoenician, because so much is lost in translation otherwise - you’ll quickly note that Cunningham is really attempting to convey the hopeless sense of man’s search for purpose in a cruel, unforgiving world. While some scholars debate the literal truth to this sentiment as expressed by the author, it is generally thought plausible if not outright likely that these writings followed a catastrophic life event of some sort - the loss of a child or death of a spouse, witnessing the end of a great civilization, a dick pic delivered to the wrong person. While the specifics aren’t known, what we do know about the author is that he would likely be further distraught at the loss of control and ownership experienced with a misattributed “law” on the internet should such a thing even be imaginable.
I like this law
Most people didn’t create content and don’t interact with it (ie most people are lurkers). Take it upon yourself to comment and interact with posts and others will almost always join in and have something to say.
Same with me. I haven’t deleted my Reddit account yet, but will be doing that soon, after I delete or overwrite my comments of 10 years there.
Between Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon, I have plenty to keep me occupied in what used to be my Reddit-scrolling time.
I used sync up until the 13th or so, then started limiting my reddit usage, and increased my lemmy usage until July 1st. Now I’m solely on lemmy on mobile, and only see reddit on desktop when I come across a search I need.
Same. I still have the app as a reminder but this is my home now.
Weekend I’m going to see about spinning up my own instance.
I really missed Reddit at first and it took a while to get TestFlight on Memmy and figure this out but it’s looking good so far.
Yep. Just check the site to see if my data request has been processed. Replied to a message in which someone was asking about Lemmy. But that’s it.
migrated to wefwef, would prefer a native app, but nevertheless i’m not even looking back. 13 year club.
Same
Same, it took me to 7/1 for me to finally uninstall RIF. Let’s wait and see what July’s numbers look like
I agree. The real change will be from 1 July onwards since none of us can use our apps anymore.
Eh, reddit could’nt even do that right. They’ve not shutdown all apps
Yeah, I don’t exactly understand how but RIF is working for me, despite the fact you can’t log into it. I only kept it as a momento, but it still works as long as you have the subs you want to see memorized…
hate to be that guy, but I also want to contribute with content, so: It’s memento
It’s like reddit never left.
Yea, Infinity is still working
Infinity has Spez’s cock down their throat and is going subscription based.
It’ll be interesting to see how many users stick with the apps that are continuing. I think the devs are crazy to think that even more than 5% of the users they had will continue to use the app for $5/month. Especially when you can’t view NSFW content.
For whatever it’s worth, I doubt it comes anywhere near their throat.
Good one!
I am not paying, Its working.
I would love it if that was true, but think the impact of the blackout making ALL users unable to access whole swathes of the site might be bigger
I think there are still some subs that are private, and I know a couple went NSFW and a bunch are getting harassed by admins to reopen or remove the NSFW tag.
My friend told me the cyberpunk sub couldn’t reply to the email they got telling them to turn off the NSFW tag. Because nearly full on sex scenes, decapitation, huge hogs with giant titties is absolutely SFW.
Even if 3% is a low number, I guarantee that 3% were reddits more active users and content creators.
If most of the quality content slows to a trickle users will continue to leave and look for more viable platforms.
It’s not 3% of users, it’s 3% of traffic. This could be caused by 0.1% of power users leaving.
How many people are less engaged in the internet at the beginning of summer because they’re on vacation or partying? I would think drops like this as the weather improves are pretty normal.
Alternatively, people with more time sign up and shitpost. I recall every summer break Redditors would complain. 🫣
That’s a good point although with smart phones, I wonder how much of the teenager traffic is baked in year round now. Summer Reddit was terrible but then it just became Reddit.
no company wants to say they’ve lost 3% of their customers
Reddit doesn’t see users as customers.
They are the product. A number that you can sell to advertisers and shareholders.That model started with literal radio. It’s not a new thing. We are the consumers and the advertisers are the customers. It’s kinda like how children are the consumers of toys but the parents are the customers. It actually makes business much harder because you have to keep two groups satisfied. The product is still airtime(radio), and nobody likes ads but they are sharing the space and funding the transmitter.
Don’t forget to donate to your local independent stations, folks. Radio is not free! Neither is Lemmy.
They also don’t want to lose 3% of their product.
No company wants to say they’ve lost 30% of their top development, marketing and QA personnel.
They can still sell the raw product numbers, for as long as advertisers and shareholders don’t realize the product has turned to shit.
I think this an overly simplistic way to look at the dynamic. Users are the primary customer, and they don’t provide any direct revenue to the company. Their value is in attracting the secondary customers though, who directly pay the company to access the users. Bring a primary customer implies that the company still needs to treat you as a customer and at least not openly antagonize you. They can’t take you for granted as a product. There is no secondary customer without you.
It’s like bars that advertise free drinks for women on certain nights. The women aren’t directly paying the bar, but the men who come to the bar because of them makes it a net profit. I’m sure there’s other examples of this primary/secondary customer dynamic. Anything cheap for kids that sells expensive stuff to parents for instance.
overly simplistic way
It was hyperbolic of course. But really,
Users are the primary customer, and they don’t provide any direct revenue
How can someone who doesn’t provide revenue be the primary customer of a profit oriented company? Ahead of others who actually do, like advertisers?
It might be better if the terms are swapped. I’m only calling them primary because they have to come first before the secondary, and they’re the foundation for everything. There’s probably a better way to term them.
Oh, I’m not denying that the users are the foundation for the business model but when Reddit makes business decisions, they first listen to those who pay them.
spaz: were not profitable, heres ways were gonna become more profitable.
redditors: ugh leaves
spaz: your small protest from the landed gentry cant hurt me.
redditors: ok, bye.
spaz: jgvbefgbaegbeQANGBLEw
Yeah, I was using Lemmy and Reddit in parallel throughout June (aside from the blackout days, where I stayed off of Reddit out of solidarity,) and only really drastically reduced my Reddit usage this month.
Same. I spent most of June trying to find a lemmy instance to join. Quit cold turkey on 1st July along with nuking my post history. Keeping my account till 31 July just in case they decide to revert my deleted posts.
I am wondering how user count is calculated.
I guarantee you that a huge percentage of Redditors have multiple accounts. Many of which might be inactive. Are all accounts ever created on Reddit still considered part of their current total or are only accounts active in the 6 or 12 months count? If people are legitimately leaving Reddit, I think their losses are going to steamroll because they won’t just lose one user, but instead they will lose that one user and their 2 or 3 alternate accounts as well.
Next month or three are going to look like a bloodybath for Reddit.
Can’t wait!
Think of how many ‘users’ are bots that likely won’t continue to work since no one would pay the monthly sub to bot Reddit like in the past.
In history terms, 3% is everything. I remember seeing a documentary where a guy claimed that every coup in history, in which 3% of the population were ardently dedicated to the cause, has been successful.
Also, this data isn’t from Reddit. It’s from SimilarWeb. They track browser access to websites, not API calls. Reddit absolutely won’t report their drop in API access, which is where the largest drop will be.
I suspect half that drop is from me alone, lol.
Reddit lost a LOT of their power users. Even if the general traffic isn’t that badly dented, it means a lot of the best content and conversations will not go back. Reddit will spiral down to a 9gag clone.
If only people would actually stop using Reddit instead of doing these useless “protests” like they do in /r/videos. They’re still using the site, that’s what Reddit wants…
I’ve been waiting for my third party app to break. Boost finally stopped working an hour ago so I signed up here.
Signed up three days ago but was still using Boost until it stopped working just now. Am now figuring out how Lemmy works.
Just FYI, the developer of Boost is making a version for Lemmy. I’ll definitely be downloading it once it’s available.
Welcome!
The Lemmy boost version is already in development and you can sign up for it already on the app store!
Hopefully we’ll get boost for lemmy soon
Do you think Boost for lemmy will give lemmy a boost?
Mine also finally stopped about an hour ago 😭 Good bye, Boost
I uninstalled on the 1st. I didn’t want the dev to get hit with a giant bill
Welcome aboard! There’s now over 400,000 of us! (Source).
Boost is still working for me, but I haven’t logged in/engaged since the blackout. If it does go any day now, I’m okay with that.
Same, ‘cept my 3PA died a few hours before it should’ve. Reddit admins are clowns.
It’s still working for me?
The protests aren’t all useless, necessarily.
Subs that go NSFW are depriving Reddit of advertising revenue, and sites that change their purpose are likely to drive away some users who don’t want to shitpost, who might then go looking for alternatives.
except they are useless when reddit will just remove anybody that doesn’t play ball
I doubt it’s seriously hurting Reddit, if at all. People would really hurt Reddit if they just stopped using it entirely. No posting, no commenting and no lurking.
Looking at the pages for lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, lemmy.world, kbin.social, as well as lemm.ee paints an interesting, if expected, picture.
For one thing, lemmy.ml is categorized as “Games > Games - Other (In United States)” which made me scratch my head to the point of hurting my scalp. The rest are uncategorized (which is better than being miscategorized, imo).
Now, for the stats:
Instance Total Visits for June 2023 % Change from May 2023 Bounce Rate Pages per Visit Average Visit Duration #1 Incoming Traffic Source (from social media) reddit.com¹ 1.7B -3.36% 37.98% 6.21 8:24 Youtube (52.48%) lemmy.world 3.5M n/a² 38.12% 6.62 8:44 Reddit (97.29%) kbin.social 2.9M +5000% 26.24% 11.2 9:18 Reddit (93.92%) lemmy.ml 1.5M +1716% 51.79% 5.55 3:54 Reddit (98.86%) feddit.de 791.7K +5000% 55.88% 2.76 3:57 Reddit (98.31%) beehaw.org 790.1K +5000% 35.48% 4.50 5:44 Reddit (96.24%) lemmy.ca 186.4K +1615% 69.14% 2.45 1:05 Reddit (100%) lemm.ee 167.5K +5000% 29.58% 6.73 5:18 Reddit (86.81%) - ¹ –
reddit.comis included as a point of comparison - ² –
lemmy.worlddidn’t exist yet in May 2023
We can see that the larger instances are already performing well in comparison to reddit when it comes to “interaction” statistics. It’s a surprise, however that
kbin.socialtrounces everyone else it was compared to–even comparing favorably withlemmy.worldin visit numbers. In comparison,lemmy.mlperformed quite badly especially in bounce rate and average visit duration. Someone who’s better equipped than me in analyzing these figures can perhaps do a better anaylsis, but from what I can see, we’re not doing that bad here.I’ve also added
lemm.eeinto the mix just for good measure (and perhaps as a proxy for smaller-ish instances), and it’s doing quite good as well.
EDITS:
- ¹ –
I see a lot of people saying, “I can’t believe it was only a 3% drop,” and I’d like to offer some context as to why there’s not enough data here to really tell a story, yet. It could go a few different ways.
The Reddit protests in June were a big deal, not just on Reddit or Lemmy, but to the media at-large. Traffic surely saw a huge influx of people wanting to look at the dumpster fire. I know that I myself used Reddit a lot leading up to the blackouts, since it was, in a sense, the last hurrah of Reddit as we knew it. The Spez AMA would have driven traffic. The NSFW sub protests would have driven traffic. All those news articles linked to Reddit directly, and they would have also driven traffic.
Even with all that, there’s still a decrease in traffic. As others have said, July will be a better metric for the actual damage done, since the media has largely moved on and aren’t driving as many visits, and 3PAs are toast.
These numbers would have been more representative if we could have had more than a quarter to look at. What was the QoQ trajectory before this? For all we know, this could have indicated business as usual, or it could have indicated something much bigger, depending on what the traffic metrics over the past 12-24 months could show us.
I also would have liked to see the history for unique sessions and unique visitors. If there was a huge influx of unique visitors compared to the past few months, but traffic was still decreased overall, then that would indicate it came from news clicks or bots.
Basically what I’m saying is that the data doesn’t paint any kind of real picture right at this moment. That doesn’t mean there was no impact though. Time will tell.
Thank you for understanding basic statistics and data analysis (some people here do not). It’s all about the trends shown by the data, rather than the raw numbers.
There’s also the rapid influx of bots, since admins were using GPT bots to astroturf on their behalf.
More importantly, traffic is a trailing indicator. The protests and anger were from content creators and moderators. As they leave, the quality on Reddit will decrease significantly but that will take months/years. And the traffic will decrease but will follow the drop in quality content and moderation. Based upon the increased quality of posts on lemmy just in the last 3 weeks, many of the content creators have moved to the fediverse.
This is for June. Third party apps were still working, and personally I didn’t change my Reddit browsing habit much during June. Now that third party apps are officially dead, I’ve been on Reddit a lot less, and been spending more time on Lemmy. Curious to see what the numbers look like for July.
Lemmy needs !RemindMe
A large number of people joined Lemmy before July. The user based for Lemmy jumped by 1600% if I remember right before July 1st
A 1600% increase in Lemmy could still be the result of a 3% drop in Reddit. There’s a massive difference in scale between the two sites.
As per the above comment, a single stat rarely paints a complete picture.
Similar Web has no idea of traffic over third party apps to start with. So it wouldn’t even notice a difference at July 1st.
I just realized that today is the first day in YEARS that I didn’t access Reddit. Sad, but it is what it is, and entirely their fault.
It was my primary social media site for over 10 years, and only one in probably the past five after ditching Facebook.
All I ever used to access it was baconreader. When the first talk of killing off the API started with the rate hike, I had a sinking feeling this was the end.
Rode it out till the last day, and reflexively kept opening baconreader just to realise again it was offline.
Decided to give Lemmy a try, and while it took a couple days to get it sorted, I have to say, for my daily browsing fix, it’s more than enough.
Yes, reddit is a giant database, and when google searches take me there I’ll view the info, but for everyday use, lurking, posting, and commenting, never again.
Not sure of its bias, user saturation, bot, shills, demographic, or what, but while smaller, the quality and content of the comments here just seems better. It reminds me of the early days on fark or even back on IRC.
It really does piss me off that greed over an IPO ruined something that had been a part of my life for so long.
I am enough of a grumpy old bastard that unless they fix the API and baconreader starts up again, I’m done. The internet is a big weird place, and I’m happy to go see other parts of it.
I just had my first experience today when I googled a question that took me to Reddit for the answer…which was deleted.
That happened to me too the other day, I stared at it for a bit and thought it must have been part of the mass deletion ppl did. It is one thing to read about it, it is an other to see it for yourself. But I fond my answer on a wiki page so it didn’t matter much. It was amusing tho.
If this happens again, and youre really insistant on reading that answer, people are saying the wayback machine should have that info for you. It’s sorta a win-win because you still get your answer and reddit doesnt get the revenue from your usage.
Then it’s worked, at least to some extent.
I agree with pretty much every single word you wrote and have gone through the same thought process, with the only exception being that I used RiF instead of Baconreader.
I never realized how significant killing third-party apps would be for me personally, but since Apollo stopped working my desire to use Reddit on my phone has dropped to zero. I’ve completely replaced it with Discord and “traditional” social media in my downtime.
If they kill old.reddit on desktop too, that will be the final nail in the coffin for me.
…and at least a little Lemmy.
I like a little look at Lemmy.
It took Apollo’s death for me to realize that I used Reddit primarily because of Apollo itself. Without it, I realized I just didn’t like Reddit all that much.
I’m the same.
Admittedly the time away from Reddit has been a boon for me as I’ve been consistently better at using spare time here and there time to actual hobbies and responsibilities.
I haven’t actively browsed Reddit since the blackout. Almost a month, it’s flown by and I’m still fine
(Actively meaning I’ve accidentally clicked a link or two that pointed to it, but I never opened the app myself)
I was a heavy user before, for sure. I used to scroll Reddit for hours a day. I uninstalled my app when the blackouts started. If I do a google search where the answer is on reddit, i’ll still look at that answer. But for the most part, I am gone. Seems like a lot of people are all bark no bite though.
I reddit a LOT at work so I was probably spending roughly 3-4 hours a day with reddit at least in the background and I haven’t actually intentionally visited the site for two weeks.
Honestly, my mental health is improving. Reddit is a shitty outrage machine that’s astroturfed by corporations and fascists.
Did the same thing and deleted my account. My muscle memory can’t find the app and my battery last a full day.
I’ve just put Connect for Lemmy in the same place where the Boost for Reddit icon was on my home screen and the problem is solved.
I open all of my apps by usings iOS search feature, i’ll occasionally still type “apollo” and be like, “oh yeah, i dont have this anymore”. It isn’t as often now though, compared to the first few weeks.
If I do a google search where the answer is on reddit
This is what I’m missing the most, because I’ve learned to automatically add “reddit” to most of my searches, since I usually could find a better discussion there.
But now it’s useless - if you need a product recommendation, it’s filled with bots obviously schilling for whoever paid, fake reviews, and it’s generally useless. And technical questions mostly lead to subreddits that were closed, and I have no idea what state are they in now - but I still don’t want to give them traffic.
But what to do now? The internet is basically unusable by now. Everyone and now even AIs are writing blog posts or videos about things they barely understand, you have literaly thousands of AI generated pages about programming questions, some of them are outright wrong, and if you need something more complex than a single command - for example how to write a good video game AI architecture (especially this search term is FUCKED. I need to rewrite steerring, navigation and behaviors for a video game, but good luck searching for “video game AI” in the last few months…), most of the articles or tutorials are pretty shitty.
Every search term is filled with mediocre blog posts, usually copy-pasted between eachother. I literally don’t know how to use the internet for deeply researching a topic anymore - everything is just barely scratching the surface in the most popularized way possible.
I guess I just have to start searching on scholar.google.com…
Don’t know if this is of any help but here is a good video. It’s about a video game ai concept I’ve not heard of before: https://youtu.be/9gf2MT-IOsg
Idiocracy seems to be getting closer and closer to being a reality
This gets made back by September.
95% of people who use reddit use the official app or website, and don’t notice a single thing except the occasional stray John Oliver meme.
Not enough hobby communities left.
I thought about this comment, and realized that somehow, I just don’t care so much anymore. Instead of worrying about what I left behind, I’m looking forward to what’s ahead of us.
I think it’s because even before the whole 3d-party-app drama, there already was this undefined feeling that Reddit’s best days are behind it. Maybe it’s the effect of ad money and monetization, or it’s the inevitable trend towards low quality content that comes with mass adoption, probably it’s both.
Whatever the cause, in most subreddits, the old Facebook-style rot had already set in. Once-cool subs now being an endless barrage of tired memes, bots farming karma, and people being assholes. The things I joined for years ago, the engaging discussion, random encounters with amazing experts, the cutting-edge internet anarchy, it’s all already long gone.
When I opened the app (Baconreader in my case), I only did it out of habit, to then spendy time scrolling through an endless list of things that made me slightly go “heh”.
So, maybe most people will stay on Reddit for now, and probably I will have to leave behind certain communities instead of finding direct replacements. But I see that as a good thing. As long as even just 2% of Reddit’s users make it here, I’m excited it will grow into something much better than what I left behind.
Well said. We’re onto something good here. The discussions are great, & I think part of the reason is because comments aren’t getting upvoted like crazy or downvoted into oblivion, nobody is karma whoring with stupid puns or references. Anyone here is just hanging out and shooting the breeze, it’s goddamn refreshing. It won’t keep that underground feel forever, but I’m glad to be here right now.
The thing that really bothers me is that some of the communities I was active in through mobile are pretty much impossible to find outside of reddit.
They’re way small on it, too, so who knows if they’ll even migrate or just fade away.
This here is really my only concern. I followed a good number of subs that existed for actual discussion, not just meme dumps, and unless they’re migrated to Lemmy, I will be missing them.
Sure, I can access Reddit just for those topics, but so far I’m staying away from that site completely in my own self-protest.
( I know, I know, I’m a literal molecule in a drop in a bucket, but damnit, I’m doing my part! :) )Be the change you want to see in the world. If those communities haven’t come over, start them. Seed them.
I think that’s going to be my plan, if I can talk to some of the current mods and ask them to do so here as well. I’ll create the new communities, but have no interest or time for actually moderating them.
I’ve tried browsing with the app but the content I’m being fed seems to have different priorities to rif. The niche stuff that I really want to read appears to be being buried.
It’s made it so much easier to just not give them any content myself as I decided to stop posting there.
I’m really looking forward to seeing where lemmy goes as it’s attracting the kind of people I enjoy associating with. Reddit is headed in the opposite direction IMO.
I feel like I was noticing this on the main site as well. I’d be surprised if they hadn’t been changing the algorithms to spoon feed us specific content, but there’s also a very high likelihood that the overall feel of the content has changed after swaths of people migrated out, and then I’m sure I have a bias against Reddit now as well :P
That is how I feel as well. I haven’t completely given up on reddit just yet, but my usage is going down, and I open reddit more by accident than anything. Lemmy is my new default and I’m not complaining.
Most people are lurkers though, I’d wager a greater proportion of active posters left.
Most lurkers view the Twitter/TikTok reposts Reddit is full of, which have not slowed down, or the ““advice”” subreddits, which have not slowed down either.
The content that people like us like, some of it has moved away, but the people who are willing to chase that content are a very small minority.
Then does it really matter, if the only ones left are those looking for and churning out low-quality content? Even if they’re the majority, who cares?
I think you are being very pessimistic about this. Reddit’s collapse will not be a linear process. If it happens mind you.
But if it happens:
- First the most active 3% leaves. But the 3% creates a huge hole in the overall activity of the site. So another 3% leaves. And the site will at an ever increasing speed reach the point of no return. Reddits main user base is the drooling masses who want to read gossip instead of working.
But if there is no free entertainment, the masses just move on. Basically all a platform is, is it’s core audience.
I’ve starting going to Reddit less and less, but if I do, my frontpage has gone to shit. I can’t even recognize it, the few instances I visited regularly are read-only and since I’ve unsubscribed the most popular default ones, there’s almost nothing left for me.
Which is good, since thanks to that I’m slowly learning to just automatically starting Lemmy instead of Reddit as my go-to social network.
DoorDash everywhere. That’s when I left.
Why the fuck is that sub so active!? Who gives that much of a shit about doordash?? I’ve never seen a Justeat/Deliveroo app. It’s so strange.
Right?? One of the more baffling outcomes of the protest. I think mindless scrollers are desperate for dopamine and will upvote literally any garbage at this point.
My only takeaway from that sub is to continue to never ever use food delivery apps, you’re making your delivery people miserable by using them.
My frontpage was mildly frustrating before ads. I won’t browse reddit with ads and their terrible app
Honestly, that’s fine. Good for Reddit.
It’s just not a place for me anymore.
deleted by creator
Havent been there since the day of the blackout, not missing anything.
The reddit we fell in love with is gone. Even if the website is still there.
The more I’ve heard from friends still using it the less desire I have to go back. At first I was gonna boycott until the end of the month but it sounds like it’s not even that good now that a lot of active posters left. Haven’t felt much urge to go back, although I do need to find new communities for some of the more niche subs I was on. My houseplant and travel hacks discussion has been very lacking since I left Reddit…
Most of that traffic is probably lurkers and content consumers. Reddit will continue chugging along for a bit, but the loss of power users and mods is about guaranteed to wither the platform over time.
There are enough reposts to keep them busy for a while I think. I swear the same post would get reposted a few weeks after the original and get just as many or more upvotes than the first time. And the top comments were usually the same or similar.
That’s the bots at work though. Create a circle-jerk of upvotes on certain topics with nothing inventive or new in between. I have yet to see a bot(like response) here. Most comments are well thought out. And the posts are pretty relevant and no ads!!!
I swear 50% of askreddit questions were bots recycling questions. You could pump it up to 100% and I doubt most lurkers would notice the difference.
Same deal with subs about cute things or videos of crazy stuff. Reddit has enough of a backlog that casual consumers probably wouldn’t even notice a slow rotation of it. I’ve seen many times somebody point out reposts and get slammed with “Well it’s new to me!” comments.
The only thing that might noticably suffer are meme subs since memes have to follow current topics, but honestly how hard can it be to make a bot that creates current event memes based on templates? The templates themselves are already run into the ground.
They’ve been astroturfing with bots to pump those numbers
There are soooo many GPT comments and threads on Reddit, at least when I left on the first. I imagine it’s going to get worse and worse now.
It’s trivial to setup a LLM designed to argue or astroturf a point now. That’s the problem.
I have been noticing a few here and there on Lemmy too. Unsure how to report it as I kept getting errors.
Reddit started with nothing but sock puppet accounts created by the devs, so I could definitely see them doing the same thing to show “activity”.
Think about all those running power delete suite or similar.
One point to keep in mind is that drama also brings engagement IN, not just out. When the drama subsides, the temporary boost in activity from new users or lurkers will go down too.
That being said, the percent decrease was always gonna be in the single digits. The average redditor was never gonna stick with a prolonged protest of a service that remains free to use.
I still visit reddit maybe once a day for 10 minutes for niche subs or communities that aren’t built up here. If those communities develop here, I will fully cut out reddit.
Edit: also when noting that I use Lemmy amount 90% of the time now, but my overall usage of Lemmy/reddit has gone down. Probably for the better, because I started reading again.
Are you me? I’ve been off Reddit like a week now and I’ve already read two books with the extra time I don’t spend doom scrolling.
In fact, I am you. What are we reading? I just finished 7 1/2 deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and Project Hail Mary.
Good stuff. We just read Cinema Speculation and the first volume of Elric of Melniboné.
niche subs or communities that aren’t built up here
Oh how I wish someone would make a shittymobilegameads community.
…or for me to get the willpower and motivation to do it myself.
If it wasn’t for my photography, I’d delete instagram. Holy shit is it pay-to-play a cesspool. And I’m being targeted for ads for all kinds of ponzi schemes and crypto and FOREX scams. Probably from watching Coffeezilla videos.
We’ll see how Lemmy picks up. I’m really liking it, thus far. Right now we’re looking at Reddit like a former, toxic partner that we want to spite. Lately I was just going on the World News, Ukraine war mega thread.
Just like Etsy. Its a horrible place to try and build a business and be creative and make money, and is being overrun by dropshipped tat, but its where everyone goes to get nice things, so its where people have to sell
I’m a hobbyist and I went there to get something nice and save myself some time making it. I expected high quality reasonable cost and I found average/low quality high cost. Disappointed.
If it wasn’t for my photography, I’d delete instagram
It’s funny, but my photography is precisely the reason I’m not on Instagram. Since day 1 I’ve never thought it is a good place for actual artistic photography; indeed it kinda directly undermined artistic photography back in the day with the “all photos must be square” rule. I’ve always considered Instagram more of a place to share snapshots. Flickr isn’t what it once was, but it’s always been more of a true photography-focused social media site.
I’m in the same boat. Been trying a few different Instagram alternatives for a few years but the user bases are all too small. Pixelfed and Vero seem decent but too much of a ghost town to feel it’s worth continuing to post.
I haven’t tried Pixelfed yet. I just got into the Fediverse and several instances on Lemmy. So I’ll eventually try Pixelfed. But 500px and Flickr seemed kind of dead to me. Vero and Vsco, I’ve heard mixed things, but also ghost-towns.
It’s to the point in IG that not even close friends nor family, see what I post. Adam Mosseri and Mark can fuck right off.
That may sound like not a lot, but Facebook as been hemorraging users for a few years now, if they’re losing users at about the same rate as Facebook, that’s a big oof.
I think the big deal will be if it’s sustained. Losing a bunch of users for a month isn’t a big deal if they come back, or at least stop leaving. If Reddit loses 3% of its users every month for a year then things will be pretty dire for them.
Can’t say I’ve got much sympathy for Reddit, though.
I would expect July to be higher since 3rd party apps were still functioning in June. That was the first wave, the second wave would have been after the apps actually shut down and will continue for a while as people see lower quality and people talking about other sites.
Precisely. “We’re” (I hate doing this, but I’m a part of the ‘oh crap I need an alternative ‘doomscroller’’ group) the early movers.
The real test is when the official app is the only game in town… from others it seems like it’s bad and will drive the traffic down even further…
Another major element is the effectiveness of moderating with the lack of API tools. If that 3% consists largely of moderators and content creators then that is going to have an impact.
The thing that kept me on reddit were the well managed niche subs. I really need to take the time to go through my pages and pages of subscriptions, and either find or start equivalent subs here.
I rarely commented on reddit, and almost never posted. The one sub I created never had a single use. Here though, I feel almost compelled to contribute as it is new and small and I want it to grow.
When the 2nd and 3rd waves of users come looking at Lemmy to see if there is an alternative, I think there should be quality subs and content to get them to stay. It’s on us to provide that.
Agreed on all counts, but y’know doesn’t look good before an IPO, I hope it gets worse.
Facebook “lost” a lot of users when GenZ decided they didn’t want to make accounts, but Instagram and (likely) Threads, did a fine job supplementing that. Meta corporation as a whole doesn’t have a big issue with maintaining their userbase.
