Reddit Activity Plummeted After The Protests

I migrated entirely to Lemmy and I don't regret it. I do miss the amount of content on Reddit, but at least I know I'm not supporting them anymore.

I'll be honest I have spent the last couple months laughing my ass off at /c/risa since I jumped ship.
Yes lemmy is rough as a badgers arse but I'll take this over endless streams of how fucked we all are or wall to wall yank politics.
- People keep saying lemmy is rough, but so far it's running just as well for me as reddit with the exception of a few hiccups. It actually has more features for navigation
- I know fuck all about trek, never really watched it, but I’ve been finding some of the memes there quite amusing
- To be honest there’s an annoying about of cynical politics here too, I’d debate these people, but I often don’t have the energy.
  Sincerely -a yank
- c/Risa is hands down my fav community! And very active.
  Lemmy is kind of rough, but I've started to love it. I definitely think that I get the same content satisfaction I had at reddit -- I think it's more true of niche communities on Lemmy at the moment.
- !fuckcars would like a word.
- I'm not sure what you've been looking at but the "we're fucked" politics is just as bad if not worse here. Its just WAY further left.
14 year redditor and I go back and forth (only for 2 subreddits) but majority of reddit, including the news portions are completely dead. RIP r/pbsnews. I vow not to comment or submit any new links for them.
- Same. I will say though, my phone usage overall has gone wayyyyy down. So. Thanks, Reddit?
Ditto. Lemmy could see more content, but the current amount is enough to keep me entertained.
Frankly the only two situations nowadays when I open Reddit is 1) cross-checking stuff posted in this comm, and 2) copypasting stuff from Reddit to Lemmy to avoid giving it more pageviews.
I moved the Reddit content I wanted into an RSS feed by putting the subreddit URL followed by /.rss into the feed URL and it works
- I never knew this. I tried with https://www.reddit.com/r/watercolour/.rss as a test. I can the the images are in the feed. But, my readers are not showing them. Do you have any suggestions on getting image previews to work?
Same, but I justify it to myself by the fact that I spend significantly less time doomscrolling.
I wish I could but there's not much of a sports community in here yet. Trying to sub and contribute where I can to change that tho.
- I'm not much into sports, but I'll be cheering you and your efforts on! Go team go! I try to post occasionally myself things that might spur discussion.
Same, except I do go back browse occasionally…no voting/commenting tho.
Lemmy can feel slow at times but the byproduct is that I find myself searching for new communities, not just replacements for my old reddit favorites.

Because the most active contributing users left. I used to comment a lot on reddit, but I've been exclusively on Lemmy since my 3rd party app was axed.

And I've been very active here. Like, even on this alt account that I made 16 days ago, my app says my post "karma" is already higher than my reddit comment karma was from over a decade.

I feel more willing to contribute because there's a sense of community, and I'm not just providing free entertainment for a company to profit off of.

Between you and @RandalThor must cover 50% of stuff I see
- I've been having fun doing it. I just post a few memes throughout the day whenever I think about it, and I also try to spread it out among some smaller communities that I want to help grow.
  So, memes and a handful of communities that I'm personally interested in.
- There's another Rand? I must meet this man over at Wheeloftime!
I've commented more on lemmy in 3 months than the last 10 years on Reddit
- Glad you're here, nutbiggums!
- Shit. I think it took me 5 years on reddit to comment once. Now I have alts! Alts!
I used to comment a lot on reddit
Same. I had a 15 year account with a couple hundred thousand karma and commented and posted a lot. If you piss off the people who actually use the site you will reap what you sow. Reddit should have known that since the exact scenario happened fir Digg when everyone migrated to reddit.
- They looked at the leaves, and failed to see the forest, thinking that simply not killing old.reddit was enough to avoid Digg-ing the grave. Because from their view that's how Digg died - v4 happened, users couldn't go back, they got pissy, and they left.
  @megane_kun@lemm.ee is also right when he says that they compared Reddit with other social media platforms and took the wrong conclusions. What keeps people in Facebook aren't "content creators" or what have you, but their relatives and friends; in Reddit there's no such thing, people weren't there because of more people but because of the content that those people created, so their connection with the platform is considerably weaker.
  I also think that the trust thermocline played a role. It wasn't the first time that the platform pissed its own users.
- I'm always happy to see a Teft post pop up in my feed.
- It's easy to argue why they thought it's not going to happen to them. They saw Facebook shrug off all of its scandals, and thought that being in a similar position, network effects are going to help them weather any storm. And it can be argued that Steve Huffman and his site did weather this particular storm. But like Facebook, trust in Huffman's site have taken a blow, and in the demographic that they would ill afford to antagonize.
  That we're starting to see its effects as early as now should scare any sane person in Huffman Inc.
- Wow I was on there longer than you and I don't think I broke 10k haha
I had over 300k comment karma, on the site every single day for about 10 years. Comparing the comments here vs there it’s crazy I hung around so long. It’s like getting out of an abusive relationship, you don’t realize how much you’re being mistreated until you’re out from under them.
- Yeah. Lemmy users aren't saints but there's a lot more friendly, cool and deep discussion than on Reddit. In the last year before I left, I had felt it's gone so shallow.
- Same. Thing is, I would usually get gold like once or twice a month. I would post well sourced, long and often highly upvoted comments. Try to be genuinely helpful or insightful. I used to be a journalist, it was an outlet for me.
  Not that they were that great, redditers upvoting stuff doesn't make a comment right or interesting, and wasting too much time there was really not something to be proud of, but if just ten thousand users like you and me quit reddit, that leaves mainly teenagers, bots and 'comedians' rehashing the same tired puns.
  It can effectively kill smaller subreddits, as has quite obviously happened in some cases.
  We weren't just customers, we also produced a disproportionate amount of the content on reddit. More than our relatively small numbers would suggest. IRC the 1% rule states that only 1% of users actively post/comment. If you're posting relatively coherent or thought out comments, you're the 1% of that 1%.
I've been very active here
I've noticed your posts almost every day and appreciate them
- Thank you, 🍝
I'm sure the notifications are annoying you by now, but I'd like to borrow the moment to agree with everyone else. You're one of the users who have ended up becoming this place's lifeblood somehow, and I pretty much always enjoy whatever you post. Or at least, a ton of what I enjoy ends up having your name on it.
I heavily appreciate seeing you around and while you are allowed to slow down for the sake of your sanity, I would notice and miss it.
- Not an annoyance at all! I don't have push notifications on, so I just check whenever I open the app next.
  And I really appreciate the kind words. I'm just happy to support lemmy growing, one dumb meme at a time.
No offense I thought you were a bot given how often I see your username haha. Good on you! You are helping to make this a better place
- Beep boop, I like sharing memes
  (Thanks!)
I've been noticing your username a lot lately. Solid memes, thank you for your service🫡
- 🫡
I've definitely seen you around a lot lately. 😁 Thanks for the joy and memes.
I was never famous on Reddit but I was a prolific commenter for six years. I gradually phased out from Reddit as I got into Lemmy until July, when I pledged not to comment or vote on Reddit ever again. I've since kept my word.
- Thanks!
  And yeah, I've checked reddit a few times for niche things, but it would just feel dirty to contribute there now.
how do you know how much karma you have in total?
- For Lemmy?
  Some apps add it up for you. One of the apps I use frequently is Voyager (on Android), and it shows it on the profile page.
  For example, here's yours: (I assume I can't see 100% of the votes though, in case your instance is federated with any that mine's not"
Yeah I already seem to be somewhere among the 1% top posters on Lemmy and I bet users like me were much more valuable to reddit than 10 lurkers. I'm sure a relatively tiny fraction of the users created 90% of the content on reddit and those most likely are also the people most annoyed by the death of 3rd party apps and I'm sure there's a ton of others like me who switched. That'll definitely show in the activity even though it might not be much in absolute numbers.
You’re not alone. Just check https://subredditstats.com/r/technology or any other sub you used to visit and you’ll see a clear drop in comments/day. After the APIcalypse, so many people just left and never came back.
- Is this data really accurate? The difference is insane for every subreddit I checked.
- Wow, that's a serious drop off! I looked at a few of my old fave subreddits and they're all the same. It's like one of those old towns in the US that was once on a main highway before a new route was built. Once bustling, now dead.
- I feel like this is by design. Reddit never wanted to be a discussion board. It wants users to keep scrolling so they see more ads.
- Wow, this is really interesting! I checked a few, and you can see a severe drop in activity.
Because the most active contributing users left.
could have fooled me; my biggest issue with the fediverse is the lack of content and reddit's content just keeps getting bigger and bigger by the day.
fortunately it works for me since i want to detox myself from all social media and the fediverse has so little content to i'm done after 30/45mins per day; in fact, i can still spend hours on reddit unregistered lurker and get more content every day than the entirety of the fediverse since its creation, combined.

I never thought it would be so easy to stop going on Reddit, but this place is good enough

good enough
IMO the users here are way more pleasant to spend time with than those on Reddit. The level of hostility in some areas of Reddit was off the charts and it seems the trolls are staying put. This definitely /mademesmile.
- I really avoided unpleasant subreddits. There were many smaller subreddits that were genuinely fun to be in. I miss those communities here. One that comes to mind is r/gintama. That sub was a great source of joy for me. Unfortunately, I couldn't find one here.
- There is a bit of a hiccup with hexbear and lemmygrad but besides that, I feel it's a very welcoming place here
- Still traces of the good ol' toxic reddit spirit
- Yeah I've had some really good conversations here, I had a lot of great little friend groups on Reddit over the years but being here made me realise I haven't had a really good chat with someone that I genuinely enjoy talking to on there for about five years. I'd honestly just assumed it was me but here I've had so many great conversations, I don't know why but possibly it's that the good interesting people aren't drowned out and beaten down by a sea of hostility.
- Eh, many brought their reddit habits over here
- I only dislike the quantity of anti musk/anti reddit posts
Totally agree. And I'm now using more of my time to relearn all the Spanish I've forgotten over the last 20 years and even improve beyond my previous level.
I also made the decision to try to use my social media/YouTube/web-browsing time on learning new things. When I'm in the mood for more mindless activities, I generally opt for watching videos where people bring positivity into the world in some way or another.
I pop on here once a day or every couple of days to fart around a very short while and then I'm back to doing my thing.
I occasionally end up on Reddit because a web search had results from there that were intriguing for whatever I was looking up. I never go in as a registered user anymore and those few times I do end up there, I'm in and out without going any farther than the thread that came up in the search results.
Thanks, Spez, for helping me take back my life!
Good enough, that’s our motto.
- We have a saying im German that encapsulates that notion: Ein gutes Pferd springt nur so hoch, wie es muss (A good horse only jumps as high as it has to.)
- 🤣
  We're a pretty darn good minor league baseball team if you ask me
Agreed, and it seems to be evolving over time.
Only thing I miss from reddit is the r/SamHarris subreddit. It was pretty much the only place on the internet, that I know of, where one could have serious, intellectually honest discussions and disagreements.
I like Lemmy but the content here is, for the most part, focused on certain popular topics and even though there's still a lot to discuss there the issue is that people have quite strong opinions and generally aren't willing to entertain alternative views on those subjects but rather have already made their mind and the replies are generally based on emotions but not always facts.

I was on reddit for 11 or 12 years. Commented several times a day. Voted 100 times or more per day. Left mid June and haven't been back once. Now I do that shit here instead.

Turns out that Reddit is a lot easier to quit than most people claim or realize. I still end up there from web searches occasionally, because some communities just don’t exist in lemmy (also lemmy frankly sucks as a place for finding niche communities due to fragmentation and shitty search tools). But besides that, there’s nothing particularly compelling about reddit anymore.
I wonder where people are going though? They’re definitely not coming here unless they’re an adult male technology/linux nerd.
- I'm a woman who has never used linux
  Still post here. Gotta get those niche communities some use.
  I know I've won when my fetish communities are here
- Um excuse me we also have knitters .
- I’m a woman, and although some technological things are interesting I’m not quite a tech nerd and definitely not a Linux one. Linux seems cool but I’m too lazy to make the jump. MacOS and/or Windows serve well enough for me.
  I also have several different Threadiverse accounts and try to post frequently in niche communities I’m interested in, although not so frequently I become the only contributor and it feels spammy.
- I'll be the first to say that if they rolled back the changes I'd return in a heartbeat.
  I miss reddit a lot, but I decided to leave if they went through with the API changes and I stand by that decision. But I definitely miss it and Tildes and Lemmy simply don't replace it.
The only reason I ever see reddit anymore is for archived info. It's only a matter of time before that's all here anyway

I wanted to call bullshit ~~but they’re entirely right.~~* Comments per day took a nosedive. Now if only more hobby communities would lift off, I’d be able to abandon Reddit entirely. I’m up to my tits in Linux and privacy guides but I still know nothing of mushroom picking. Nothing!

Edit: *some users pointed out that subredditstats is no longer capable of accurately tracking comment numbers. I was wrong.

And that's exactly why lemmy needs to grow its userbase significantly before it can ever become mainstream.
- grow sounded nice until you said mainstream.
I’m up to my tits in Linux and privacy guides
omg I'm seriously loling rn 😆 there's so much fucking linux on this site. ive been using linux for ~14 years (exclusively for 2), and i have no idea what most linux posts are going on about, nor do i know anyone with a linux pc in my real life. us on lemmy have somehow managed to find each other.
i give it a few months until i have my own instance, a pi hole (whatever tf that is), and completely blocked google from tracking me in any way.
- I still love seeing them despite lying outside my interests. Seeing someone’s passion project or troubleshooting session from the outside is interesting, if only thanks to their enthusiasm inspiring novel approaches and clever workarounds.
- Pi hole is brilliant
- I like a good project. Pi-Hole actually frustrated me with how easy and straightforward it was to set up. Maybe like- ten minutes total. You won't regret it.
- Pi-hole isn't a complicated tech thing!
  It's just a raspberry pi with a piece of software that you attach to your router and set up block lists that...
  Well shit, maybe it is.
Thanks for the giggle. Coffee wasn't helping that much but the thought of someone just standing near some mushrooms and dramatically throwing their hands in the air pepped me right up
!mycology@mander.xyz
!fungusid@mander.xyz needs some love... pick random mushrooms you find, say you're thinking of eating it and wait for a lot of "NONOONOOOOOO"s in the comments. Next step is ????, then profit!
You could always try some of the AI content:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai
- We have mycology and a few shrooms communities. Just browse my history for the exact links and some neeto grow pics.
- I have actually learned a bit about growing here, but I’m infinitely more interested in foraging and identifying. It’s like geotagging, but edible.
How accurate is that site, though? I checked one sub and it seems to heavily undercount the number of threads and comments.
- Hmm, you’re right. The site missed 75% of the comments on the subreddit I checked.
Is Subredditstats still working after reddit api changes?
My guess is that they are also rate limited, so that information may not be valid.
- Another user and I checked and it seems not to be accurate anymore, you’re right.

Content creators left.

You lose those, you're fucked. A full fckin 80-90% of any given user base are consumers / commenters and they follow content. Creators are a keystone species.

Yeah. Reddit seemed to view users like every other social media app without realizing that a lot of the successful apps compensate those who add value to the app.
The official app seems ok for consuming content, but it was dogshit for meaningful interaction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25rule
- Well I contribute to the 90% of lurkers. I upvote posts and comments. It ain’t much but it’s honest work.

The completely unblockable hegetsus ads were really what made me switch to Apollo from the official Reddit app. Then killing third party apps made me leave for good. Bravo, Reddit

They could have done so much. Force third party apps to use their ads or make a reddit premium subscription. Instead they decided to destroy all their free labor.
- They didn't have to force them, third party devs asked them to let them use their ads and Reddit told them no!
- Greed comes for every company eventually.
- See, he does get us…
hegetsus
Heget
Those ads were pretty based tbh
- What were the ads about?

Do you think there is something inherent to the reddit-format that promotes toilet scrolling? I think so.
- Much more than the old school forums it "replaced"
Man, if I could blow my own horn as well as you blow yours I too would need a whole lot of privacy!
I wasn’t one of the 1% on Reddit, not even remotely close, but I suspect I might be close on lemmy (excluding repost/mirror/auto bots). I really wanted lemmy to succeed and knew that some people, almost any people, had to step up and help get the ball rolling initially. So I started 5 Reddit subs I missed, posted content every day for a few weeks and they’ve been reasonably successful. !badrealestate has 5k subscribers and that feels like a decent contribution.

If you open Reddit without an account on a browser, it will automatically create a username for you when you are on site now. Hopped on to look at a post on a semi active subreddit and saw I was somehow logged in, but it was an auto generated account name. Wonder if they are trying to boost numbers that way as well

Just tried it and that did not happen. There was a pop-up asking me to sign in via Google though so I'm going to guess you accidentally clicked yes on that at some point.
- It was actually on a work computer using chrome that absolutely no one uses, I'm not even logged in on that machine nor is chrome. This happened a few days ago now, let me see if it will do it again.
  Here's what popped up
- It’s the birthplace of all the quality memes after all. Reddit clearly saw that as more of an opportunity rather than a risk.
That seems like a GDPR and CCPA nightmare.

Honestly, I’ve enjoyed Lemmy far more since joining than I had been enjoying reddit for at least a couple years.

Same. The meme overload on the /all/ sort can be kind of obnoxious but it's so easy to block communities that it's a minor nuisance.
- lemmy has become much tolerable after i blocked all the meme communities.
  i also block hexbear and beehaw for separate reasons.
  The problem is - on reddit, the userbase is large enough that I can decide what I want to talk about. If i want to discuss underwater basket weaving, there will be communities talking about that. lemmy is nowhere near big enough - there's traction on /all/ but not on the smaller communities.

If you're trying to sneakily manipulate karma and content, you don't want to be doing it through the API, you want it to look like legitimate users so it doesn't get blocked. This usually means some kind of browser automation.
Of course, reddit does so little to combat it, maybe there really were sleazy astro-turfing botnets just accessing the site through the API.
- Back in like 2018, reddit posted some user stats, including a list of "most addicted cities". They forgot to scrub the results and Eglin Airforce Base was the top rank.
  The fact that it wasn't blocked implies reddit admins are OK with the airforce's botfarm, and would allow them to use the API.
You have to remember that APIs were used massively by third party apps users.
I don't see a reason to attribute the API related drop more to automation than users stopping browsing reddit because third party app ban.
If I recall correctly (I might be wrong), July/11 was when the 3PAs stopped working. Regardless of that I don't think that those karma farms relied on the API, because as @PoliticalAgitator said they want to avoid shadowbanning.
However, if we follow your reasoning, it's still a fucking dumb move from Reddit Inc. to kill what made the place active. The issue with bots was never their usage, but rather that they went unmarked, pretending to be human beings [re]posting stuff.

We did it Lemmy!

I haven't posted once since RIF was disabled. I think my account is up to 16 years now. I've been on a subreddit if Google brought me there, but I don't browse anymore.
Jerboa is pretty similar to RIF so it's been great.
- If you haven't, give Sync a try too. Really nice coming from years of RIF.
- yo, i just left Jerboa for Sync. i second the other commenter by suggesting you give Sync a shot.
- Infinity just moved to a subscription model, so i don't have to check anymore
  Even though I've already been using the Lemmy fork, Eternity, its nice to know that I'm basically never gonna have to use that god forsaken site ever again
I still can't bring myself to delete it. It just sits there on my phone, all sad.
- Shit, I still have alien blue. Oh, the memories. Thank you, Jase and Christian.
- Same. I have an Android too where Sync and Sync for Lemmy hang out right next to each other alphabetically.
- Same for me and baconreader 😭
All my homies hate Reddit.

I would probably still post on reddit if I could do it from my phone in an app that actually works instead of being a glorified ad platform. They killed 3rd party apps to bully users to switch to the official app to boost the usage stats to have a better angle to haggle for their IPO. Problem is that the official app is just excruciatingly painful to use if you are accustomed to a proper reddit browsing tool.

The backhanded, sneaky way they did it with all the denial and lies was just the straw that broke the camel's back. Instead of being upfront and calling a spade a spade, they commited to a hostile takeover and removed all doubt that reddit is going to stay a platform for the people.

If they would have been honest from the get-go I might have continued posting.

I feel like spez just wildly overestimated the level of love/addiction the average user has for Reddit.
Clearly he figured that people were so attached to the platform that they could be coerced into using the official app.
In a beautiful miscalculation, it appears that many, many users would rather just leave entirely than to use it.
The app which, by the way, they also bought out (somewhat forcibly if I am remembering correctly) from a third party then ran it into the ground.
Couldn't have said it better.

Yeah I went to subredditstats.com and checked out a few of the subreddits with a lot of subscribers. They all show a huge drop both in number of comments and number of posts per day. This is the first time I saw some hard evidence that people have moved away, and it's a lot more than I thought.

It looks like a lot more people left Reddit than joined Lemmy or the other Reddit alternatives. I reckon most people who left didn't actually seek out an alternative and are just spending more time on Facebook/Tiktok/forum sites etc. Or they might be being productive with the time that they would've otherwise spent on Reddit lol.
Where did they go?
- Outside to touch some grass. Or replaced it with another vice like lemmy. :)

I never participated on Reddit, but I used it to check in on tech stuff and other various interests. I didn't spend a lotta time on it, but it was definitely the platform that I spent time on the most.

When all the third-party stuff started happening, I decided to take the principled stand and quit using it, but I was worried it was gonna be difficult.

I was wrong. It was super easy ditching it.

Even though it was the "social" platform I was spending the most time on, it also felt like the easiest to replace—mostly because that content could be found elsewhere. This kinda made me realize that Reddit doesn't have a moat, and it confirmed what I knew all along—the value of the platform is derived from its users. So when there's enough collective will to do something (in this case, fight against network effects), it's incredibly powerful.

So I used this free tool I built called Reddit Account Manager to gather all my subscriptions, bookmarks, etc., and then Power Delete Suite to delete all my accounts.

I noticed that my time spent online in general had also decreased.

10/10 would recommend.

Regarding Power Delete Suite, this fork (from deestan) is recommended over j0be's (the one that you linked), if you're editing the content before/instead of removing it. That's because Reddit added a timer between comment editions (to be fair spammers were using it).
- Nice, thanks for sharing.
I missed browsing reddit for about a week after almost a decade of using it multiple times a day. They made the decision to leave very easy for me with how they handled the protests.
- This might make some people mad, but I'm actually glad they didn't change anything. I don't like the enshittification of things, but I do like that the worse things get, the more motivated people are to organize, move, and enact change (like migrating to the Fediverse).
  Unfortunately, things often have to get much worse before they get better. Humans have a tendency to do that, oftentimes when it's too late. Of course with some things, it matters more than others.
I've found there are still useful chunks of information on niche topics I follow only found on Reddit. I'll poke in see what I need to and drop out. No browsing, no posting, upvotes or account logins.
I've got more time for other things since ditching reddit, Lemmy is cool and all but I've lost that itch. The memes are pretty stale here and the communities I can browse every couple of days and keep up-to-date.
Overall it's been a good change for me, thanks reddit for shooting yourselves in the foot.

I used to use reddit everyday. Now it's like once a week, same as lemmy too. Now I just surf FB MP in my spare time and watch YouTube..

A lot more tiktok for me. Say what you will of the platform, it's at the beginning of the enshittification spectrum and has a ton of original and interesting content.
I do use Lemmy every day too tho.
- I feel like the vast majority of tiktok haters never tried it. The algorithm works really well, and it's no where near as addictive as people claim. Could it be bad for children, sure. But you could say the same for a lot of other social media.
  It's also the only major platform that has limiting features built into it, if you do have a social media problem.
Way more YouTube for me, a Bit more of Twitch, a bit more Discord, and even a bit more of Instagram than I thought I would, but still, way way more Lemmy than anything else
- Way more grass touching for me. Down on YouTube activity, Discord, Lemmy, all of it. Turns out picking up a botany hobby can be INCREDIBLY ADDICTIVE and every waking moment will be spent wading through prairies and forests hunting for rare Asclepias species.

r/AskReddit posts or day

https://i.imgur.com/sNJEHHQ.jpeg

What's going on there? Really the api change did this?

Really the api change did this?
Kind of. It wasn't just the change itself, but also how it was done.
Reddit showed complete lack of care about its own userbase (specially blind people and moderators) and that it's an extremely scummy company, even for company standards. It could've pulled the unreasonable API prices to kill off 3PA but it would need smarter people in charge of the decision than the ones who did it.
- I’m no business expert, but the thing is I was a heavy user. Had they made the API changes reasonable and worked with the devs, I would have been happy to pay for the service i used so much (I already paid for the app, what’s a few more bucks a month?)
  But them to charge such exorbitant fees, be dicks to users and creators, then treat those who were upset like the bad guy? That’s a spectacularly bad approach to business.
Their official app is utter garbage, if it weren’t I may have stayed. People like me have decided that if the Reddit experience has to be so bad, it’s better not to be on reddit at all.
Imagine your favourite burger joint from now on only allowed you to enter from the back alley where it smells like piss and walls are mouldy - then once you get in all burgers have an added layer of spam and Nutella that you can’t opt out of.
Damn! If I remember right, that's always been one of their most active subs.
They sold out their core product for a short term gain, and I hope it's biting them in the ass now.
- Their CEO saw what Musk was doing with X and thought "Brilliant! I have to try that!"
  I'm not joking. Spez specifically credits Musk with giving him the idea.
That and spez was a total ass about the whole thing, lying to app devs & just being a fucking jerk.
He did an AMA & fucked that up with either answering no questions or copying & pasting canned responses to obvious plants.
Then the admins started forcefully removing & replacing mods who were protesting by making their subs private and not reverting them. So yeah, you can imagine how well that went over when the new mods had no prior mod experience and/or knew nothing about the topic of the sub they were now modding.
It was a shitshow all around.
It is probably that those who used third party apps were those more likely to try to get karma and engage with the site. The switch wasn't worth it for the heavy users making posts, so posts fell.
Mobile apps are key.

Other than Lemmy, where did users go?

Outside lol.
I'm honestly curious too.
They obviously didn't all come here. I wonder how many we're talking about. Maybe they just sort of dispersed into the various other social media sites?
- I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the vast majority of "users" either came to Lemmy, Kbin, or Mastodon. There were a surprisingly small amount of users that weren't bots, and were content generators, either in OC, or comments.
  I suspect many, if not most, of the bots got turned off, only to be replaced by enshittified bots. It's way too obvious who's a bot on Reddit now. Prior to the migration, it was much more difficult to identify a bot over there.
- Lotta people went to Tumblr for a bit, also Discord for sports and live chats
  Honestly having a few apps to cycle through has felt pretty good for me
- /r/outside ? I thought people left reddit /s
Likely Discord, playing games, outside... a few perhaps to oldschool forums.
- I know one of my friends is using dedicated forums like stack overflow now
- Yep, I'm pretty confident people went to Discord, TikTok, YouTube, Tumblr, HackerNews, Tildes, Discuit, etc.
  Obviously not everyone came here, but it seems people spread out a lot more and don't spend time on any one site.
- I’ve probably been on Reddit 5 times since they killed the apps.
  I’m S ranking Cuphead over and over again on my Steam deck. I’ll probably be doing that 20 years from now.
  Nothing soothes me like that game, which is crazy because it’s frustrating as hell. Oh but that feeling when you get hit right after you hear “KNOCKOUT” is unbeatable.
Discord, Instagram, Telegram, (fark :P) would be my guesses.
Bluesky, Mastodon, the wide array of reddit knockoffs like squabblr and hubski
The library
I started learning guitar again with the additional time, after a 13 year period of not taking it seriously.
I've seen improvements in Sight reading General dexterity Fretboard layout comprehension Clarity (less buzz/fuzz)
Thanks for being trash, reddit. It was exactly what I needed to get my ass moving and doing something more worthwhile.
- I started playing chess again. I'm ass at it, but hopefully I'll get much better with time. And if not, at least it's a nice little distraction from everything else.
I read more now tbh
Private chat rooms has been my guess for a number of years. The internet got too public. Big boards aren't practical anymore.

I refuse to use the reddit app. Theres a lot of features missing that I require.

Making the font size adjustable requires hundreds of millions of dollars of investment! /s
I'm not surprised at the statistics. Redditors using third party apps were probably more likely to be hardcore users and contributors and not just consumers/lurkers. Taking away those apps without a suitable replacement was a totally braindead move, especially when your official app is inferior to almost every single third party app out there.
- pretty sure blind people cant even use the official app, which pissed off the blind subreddit for some weird reason when 3rd party apps got nuked

let's hope that reddit will die soon!

AI bots will keep it afloat till they IPO, then comes the long downward slide once admins get their bag and jump ship. Legit was going to invest before they started making all the wrong decisions. Gonna be a massive shorting opportunity.

Well, they did say that about only the 10% of users were the ones who make comments and engage with the communities, and guess what, that 10% did use more likely than not, the third party apps. I've been a redditor for more than 16 years with a lot of karma, I deleted all my accounts but one, the oldest I had. I've been back for a couple of niche communities but I haven't commented nor upvoted anything.

Another factor that they probably didn't consider is that those 10% were, on average, more informed about what was happening and what happened in the past (see spoiler for examples). So for a lot of those people in the 10%, even if they didn't use the 3PAs (I predict that a lot of them were desktop users), it was the straw breaking the camel's back - I bet that some people felt outright disgusted for contributing with the profits of a disgusting company like Reddit Inc.
- How was Ellen Pao a scapegoat? It's been a while. Ive been a 13 year redditor somibr pretty much seen everything including the Pao bullshit but I don't recall her being a scapegoat so much as her saying a lot of stupid stuff.
  Then again, it's been a while
- I haven't used app and accessed via browser. Reason why i left was arrogance of the management and it help me realize that reddit became time-waster for me. Quality of discussion was often poor, softly said.
I kept my ancient account as well, but I did remove all my posts and comments.
Lurking is fine. It just uses their server resources and doesn't give them much value
- They live of ads so they benefit from lurking as well.

I was a daily heavy user of Reddit. I was an Eternian and a Centurion. I haven't spent an hour total on Reddit since July 1.

It helps that their app is absolute shit.
No, i don’t want to see whatever popular fluff is out there while I’m browsing the things I’m interested in, fuck off.
I only use Reddit for the nsfw stuff - it’s still the best platform - but every time I’m in between pictures on my account where I’m only subbed to porn and Reddit shoehorns posts of people asking for legal advice, students looking for university housing tips in a city 100 km from here, highly inspiring LinkedIn video from mademesmile or whatever pedestrian trash… man. Just let me wank.
What the hell is an eternian/centurion?
- I think he's saying he likes horses and centaurs. Not sure how that applies to using Reddit though.
- I was being a tool. I was in Eternity Club which is s private sub for people who had hit the front page. I got there by luck. I was also a member of Century Club, a private sub for people who had either 100,000 comment karma or post karma. I got there with comment karma without karma whoring over 7 years. Neither of them means anything. Eternity was kind of cool but very slow. Century was fucking annoying.
Same here. The only time I've been on reddit since was for tech support.
Being in Eternal Club just means you got lucky once. You need to work for CC.
- It wasn't luck! I posted about my maple syrup system and spent 24 hours answering 1,000 comments and questions. It was hard work.
- Huh.. didnt realize I am a centurion over there. I.e 100k+ karma

It's easier to quit now that all the good posters have already quit.

There's very little engagement to be had from the site anymore. There's a narrow range of acceptable discourse, and anyone going off message is quickly censored.

The news subreddits got hit worst of all. It's pure propaganda , and you can only read so many comments about the great Biden economy and the removed Russian orc before your eyes start to glaze over.

So far lemmy sucks for video game news.

So start posting links to video game news. That's the whole point
It sucks for Arduino and electronics stuff too, but we are early (I hope.)
It also sucks for game development community too. I've been thinking of going back to Reddit. Lemmy is neat but the community is mainly Linux users who seem to purposely miss the point of a lot of things. Specially if you aren't making it using open source software.
Which is unfortunate since we had both a Nintendo Direct and a State of Play today.
- We did?

I haven’t been back. I also blocked it on PiHole and Kagi, so they don’t even show up in my search results. Reddit is dead to me.

All the people on r/piracy there better jump ship before Reddit sells all their info to Big Brother

Too late. Thankfully the piracy Lemmy instance is fairly strong.

I used to use reddit every day for prob a half hour per day. Now i get on reddit for 2 minutes once a week to copy a podcast announcement to /c/monero@monero.town and thats it. All my reddit usage went to lemmy.

That is THE WAY

It doesn't help that they are using facebook-like tactics to try and force/coerce you to download and use their app. I recently was trying to find help getting through a difficult part of a game. Reddit seemed to be where most of the good user discussions were at. Reddit's mobile page would give me a pop-up stating that this community was not "trusted" and that I need to view on the app or go to the Reddit front page. There was no option to ignore. Trying to close the pop-up would just send me to the front page. Luckily, I know about old.reddit. That's going to go away eventually though.

Change the link to old.reddit.com
The day they kill old reddit is the day the platform literally dies for me. I wouldn't even care about existing content at that point.

Tbh I think the vast majority of people that use these sites are just there to mindlessly scroll. I do imagine a lot of their reactions to the protests was to be pissed at the weird basement dwellers disrupting their porn/aww/etc feeds

More than anything, the fact that Reddit absolutely quadruple-downed on steering people to their garbage app at the same time probably drove a lot of that crowd away. I regard it like ~~Twitter~~ X now: just another rotting, closed-off corporate theme park - and I refuse to believe any content I hit a login wall after getting linked to is important enough to deal with their shit.

be pissed at the weird basement dwellers disrupting their porn/aww/etc feeds
LOL - I think this is a very apt description. For every person that has left, there are a dozen more like this. Couldn't care less that 4 of the 5 top posts are reposted tiktok videos.

Whatever you do, don't go back, as it's only the dregs of society left there. Honestly, it's horrible on there now. I permanently left it yesterday.

I "go back" for some of the writers I follow that still post their work to reddit. Even the subs they post in are a shadow of what they were, and browsing "all" is depressing

So how much of the use today is from bots? I imagine that percent went significantly up.

But, using reduced posting as an indicator of reduced active users presumes users have any say in what is promoted in a subreddit. And that’s obviously wrong. Reddit is compromised through and through. Worse than Digg ever was.
I fully agree with this because the events affected older and fairly active users (the ones most likely to be a mod, and to use a 3PA) way, way more than the rest, and yet they run the place. So if you got 50~70% of everyone leaving, you probably got [eyeballing] 90% of those leaving.
Yeah and no one wants to use their garbage app on mobile.

I’m not surprised. The user interface for mobile has just gotten awful, and losing third party apps was the last nail in the coffin for me. Within a day I couldn’t stand the official app and went to other sites.

Shocker, the troll who said Elon Musk was a genius and has sex with an orange cat with silicone implants on the side was wrong??

Run that second part by me again?? Spez did what?
Garfield can do so much better

Hey, at least the attention whoring subs are getting a lot of frontpage time XD

Like the "amiugly" and all its variants, which I didn't even know existed until after the fiasco pushed them to get on the r/all frontpage.

Shame Reddit took such a nosedive. It's a good reminder that no good thing last forever when an IPO is announced and it's time to squeeze every last dollar out

It's only hard for me to keep up with sports discussion without reddit but whatever.

tha'ts what radio is for!
- Sports radio is usually terrible though lol. Sports stuff is a legitimate hole here (compared to reddit), but I also have to imagine it's much more resource intensive to host/moderate. Game threads routinely get thousands or tens of thousands of comments -- it's a bunch of people in there for three hours straight -- and people yell at each other over sports all the time.
This is literally the only thing I miss about Reddit, hopefully the sports communities will shore up some more

Was there an up to date register of best alternatives per each subreddit?

I used sub.rehab to find alternatives to the various subreddit communities, that's partially why I'm on lemmy to begin with

I'd say it goes deeper than that. the lack of a proper mobile app has definitely decreased my presence on reddit. but there's more.

i do visit some 'niche' subreddits about once a day from my desktop (hurrah for old.reddit), and i once went to popular+hot -- it was utter rubbish. being here and on mastodon has opened my eyes on how severely the general content on reddit has deteriorated.

I'm on Lemmy and I'll be honest, I'm still looking for better content here.
There are old memes, comics, Linux memes, and that's about it. If I filter for my subscribed stuff, I get nothing new for 12 hours.
But I'm still not going back to Reddit after fucking over third party apps.
- It will come, just growing pains. But yeah I'm on the equivalent of r/all a lot here just to find new stuff.

My honest reaction to that information

Mine is more like,
\

\ Because even if Lemmy didn't get huge I still want to watch Reddit die.

Not only that.. But the hell would want to buy Reddit awards anymore?

The figure is probably closer to 40% than 90%, subredditstats seems to be affected by the api changes too. However 40% at the low end of the range is still phenomenally bad. And every subreddit is definitely seeing a constantly declining amount of activity now.

I just can't bring myself to use it anymore. It just makes me so sad and disgusted. I used to browse daily. I feel bad for the people still on there seemingly unaware how much they are being taken advantage of and how little the platform cares for them.

It was pretty obvious from looking at /r/all that upvotes and comments are way down. Posts from somewhat obscure subreddits are making it to the front page, something you never saw before. People may be reading, but they're not participating as much as before.

Yup. Still, having someone to actually measure it is nice.
And based on the Reddark site, obscure subreddits were likely affected even harder, as plenty of them are still restricted or private (since Reddit doesn't care about those).
Meal time videos is fucking dead. Is there any counterpart on fediverse?
- !mealtimevideos@lemmy.world and !mealtimevideos@lemmy.best seem to exist

The ~~roof~~ reddit, the ~~roof~~ reddit, the ~~roof~~ reddit is on fire

We don't need no water let the motherfucker burn

Burn motherfucker burn.

YouTube is strong because it has an evergreen library. Reddit relies on the present. That makes it much easier to change platform.

I'm happy to see that the big German communities declined by more than half, and went from growth to decline

When does the narwhal bacon?

Anybody??

More like ReTikTok

I cut the cord and deleted every account I had, something like 10+ years and haven’t looked back since then. Could I see myself going back? Maybe if there were substantial changes in leadership and if they took some sort of steps to rectify, but neither of those look forthcoming, soooo… here we are.

I've left and before i did i used two different automation to clean after myself in multiple ways . No coming back for me :P

It will be quite a shame to see Reddit gone (like in the way of Myspace). I really read tons of posts hourly and daily on the site. I am still currently a member on the site. Hope there will be better places to go if Reddit is gone.

I deleted all of my comments and sold off my accounts to what I presume were overseas buyers. You can get $100 USD for an account at least 5 years old with 10,000 karma. I had a few that were in the 13y +40-50k karma that got significantly more, even with all comments deleted. Just sell out and take the money
- Where did you sell it?
- But is a 10k+ karma account really worth that much?
- Huh shit, I had 10 years and 200k karma but deleted it.
Maybe it's necessary to get chance for something better to emerge. Until cycle repeats again.

Puts when it IPOs to the Moon!

Do you mean Moon (Mississippi)

Infinity stopped working too very recently so that i don't even open my account in reddit

This is a decision to only let those stupid enough to pay for premium enjoy the site