/r/AskReddit Comments Per Day, Graphed

Did the actual comments fall or did the tool get hit by the API change?

I find it very interesting that this is reportedly one of the top subs on all of Reddit: "Comments Per Day" ranks it #1, by Subscribers or Posts Per Day it is #2, Growth (Day) and Growth (Month) are both #5, Growth (Month) and Growth (Year) are both #4, etc.

Not only that, it is by far the top sub by this "Comments Per Day" metric: it shows 15828 Comments reported in a recent 24-hr period of time, whereas the next highest sub is r/worldnews with a mere 5153 Comments Per Day, then r/AmItheAsshole and r/nfl also ~5k, then others rapidly falling further like r/NoStupidQuestions and r/AITAH each ~3k, etc.

To reiterate: this is the #1 sub over all of Reddit, with >3x more comments per day than any other sub, and like more comments than the next 3 subs all combined... and it still has fallen off a cliff, even by this same exact metric.

I do not know how reliable subredditstats.com is overall, but even if it were not so good lately, so long as all the stats are more or less evenly biased across all the subs, we should still be able to learn something from these comparisons? (please add a correction if you know of some evidence that this is not true) One caveat is that it might be harder to compare now vs. pre-API changes? But if it can be believed, the numbers fell from a peak of >100k in June 2023, to a more average ~75k, then dropped like a rock in July to ~15k and has remained hovering around that area ever since...

I do not visit popular subs on Reddit anymore, just one that has refused to migrate to Lemmy/Kbin, but this sounds entirely believable to me. If you click the links to the top posts, the very title titles of the posts and top comments to them also showcase the change: like the #2 top post to that sub is "Now that Reddit are killing 3rd party apps on July 1st what are great alternatives to Reddit?" w/ 78.1k upvotes, and has the top comment w/ 5.2k upvotes of "I might get back into reading books after over a decade." (and other comments likewise, pointing to Reddit alternatives, and angry exclamations about the 3rd party apps going away)

In short, THIS seems to be the evidence that we have been waiting for all this time, about just how far Reddit has fallen / died off?

Although comments on Lemmy/Kbin I do not think have risen by +~50k or so per day, so I wonder where all that Reddit traffic went? Possibly as the aforementioned comment said, it went offline, basically nowhere.

Edit: I nominated this post to m/BestOf.

Not that I don't appreciate the cynicism, but by killing the api, could be a major dropoff in bot accounts.

The satisfaction of seeing this is hard to describe. Internet 1 : 0 Reddit

I do visit Reddit on occasion (with Adblock) but I haven’t made one comment or one post since I lost Apollo. Why? I deleted all history then deleted the accounts. I can’t even upvote and that’s my little protest still in full swing.

I was commenting regularly. Now I comment here, sorry y'all.

I loved Reddit, until executives took a nosedive and their admins screwed my account over with a blatantly false suspension.

Swartz would be appalled at what Huffman has done.

I clicked on an AskReddit link in google earlier today and wow the posts that receive engagement there now... From the little I've seen since leaving, reddit in general has dropped off a fuckin cliff in regards to content quality

Not sure I believe it. A drop off like this is absolute death spiral territory, and the exodus of users would be way more clear, as places like here would have exploded in new accounts. These people aren’t just going to go outside, so where are the commensurate rises in activity on other websites?

Reddit's content has taken an absolute nose dive, I still lurk, but every time I think about posting, I close out the tab and leave now. The site has also become an ad filled dumpster fire.

I'm actually quite surprised by this, but satisfied nonetheless.

80% year on year drop is impressive

And it's not just r/askreddit all subreddits I tried show a similar drop, including the ones that still seem relatively active.

I figured the highest engagement users would leave because they'd care the most about the api changes but wow, I checked a few subs and they all had harsh engagement drops just like askreddit.

Wow I didn't know it dropped off a cliff like that in July

Has the community changed much during that time?

You mean the API changes that stopped the only source of these statistics from collecting them stopped effectively collecting them?

What the hell happened in the second half of 2020?

Does that mean askreddit is good again?

This is most pleasing

what happened in the 3rd quarter of 2020? from 0 to 200k comments, and then down again.

Ouch

And they're still ranking #1 on the Comments per Day category with just 15k comments. I'd imagine they're way bigger than that

Did they opt out of appearing in all? I know a subreddit that had a similar drop after doing it.

What's happened at the middle of 2023 there?

Permanently Deleted

What interests me the most in this date is the downwards trend between half 2021 to June 2023. I wonder if it's r/askreddit-specific, or a general trend - since the site was already showing signs of decadence years before the APIcalypse.