Reddit

That depends on how it's written. The fact that it's not showing zero completely makes me think they'd been iterating over threads counting comments, and they're hitting API limits. But that's just a blind guess without having looked at their source code.

There is a big fat warning at the top of the page saying that the data is out of date, or innacurate due to the api changes

Funny enough, if it is an API problem, then this is one of the scenarios that a scrapper could easily solve the issue and grant accurate results again. A playwright script written by ChatGTP could do it.

I read reddit with a client that uses a scrapper now. The fuck is reddit gonna do, block Chromium? They said they wanted to stop this, well, congrats, they started it instead.

Yes, a big factor, many users gradually left the site after the API changed. Also the sub mods have become increasingly ban-happy in the recent years.

Possibly as the aforementioned comment said, it went offline, basically nowhere.

Probably depends on the audience. Discord for some, a bit of Lemmy, people maybe went back to old school forums too.

this is not an opinion that should be shared by anyone who has opened a frontpage comment section in the last 3 months. bot spam has only gotten significantly worse since july.

the API changes had no effect on bot accounts, anyway. reddit corp specifically made an exception for them and other "low volume" API users - which is why you can still use your own API key to activate defunct 3rd party apps.

(yes, the implication is that normal users can go to hell if they don't want to use the app - but by imitating a bot, reddit gives you preferential treatment. they want bots juicing their activity metrics.)

my guess is that subredditstats.com is itself impacted by the API changes, or this is a consequence of frontpage posts cycling MUCH more slowly than they did before the protests. fewer individual posts reaching r/all means less traffic and fewer comments as a result.

Same. It's unavoidable to use it when it turns up in Google searches or for niche content, but I've 100% stopped contributing.

The corporate world undervalues goodwill, both from their customers and their employees.

I seen that too. It has become especially apparent on a small sub I still view as it didn't really migrate.

It went from people in their 20s discussing shared experiences with a medical condition, with the occasional high schooler dropping by to ask something. To babys first experiences, with condition. Absolutely filled to the brim with 13-17 year olds.

I'm fine with them being there and asking questions and talking, but not when every post and comment is just more teenage drama.

I seen a similar thing on another sub, while that has always screwed younger then the first, it definitely feels like it dropped like 5 years in average age.

Well, I started just playing more my game backlog on Steam and finding other things to do that wasn't scrolling the interwebs most of the time. I come here, sure, but no where near as much as I did on reddit, and I don't comment here nearly as much as I did there either.

I actually did stop engaging as much after eliminating Reddit. Lemmy is nice sometimes, but I'm nowhere near as active. I probably post a few more YouTube comments, that's about it.

1. Something like 80% of reddit users don't interact at all and like 80% don't comment. So a tiny portion of reddit users actually generate comments.

2. Comments don't tend to be linear, more comments drive more people to engage which means more comments, so it forms a near exponential curve

3. Other websites HAVE seen and explosion in activity. Look at a similar graph for lemmy and you'll see a huge rise. Maybe not 1 to 1, but enough that if you extrapolate the same to other websites you can account for all the missing users.

Yeah that kind of a drop looks more to me like a change in reporting

a) a lot of accounts are bots, and depending on how they are implemented, a LOT of these have remained (or even were created) after the API changes - remember, it's easy to spin up 1000s of these to each provide small traffic so as to not run up against the API limits. Overall, I suspect a ton more bots are there now, b/c the bot defense effort was suspended, b/c unlike a single bot, that one needs to look at ALL traffic (I suppose it could be re-written from scratch in a decentralized manner but... the developers did not choose to do that).

b) a lot of people who remain on Reddit, including myself, offer it WAY less traffic than before. I used to be a mod of a small sub, which I quit, so I went from checking it almost literally hourly, so at most once a day, and most days I do not even comment at all. Also, I used to browse r/all (actually, "popular"), but now I never do, instead preferring Lemmy/Kbin for that. My personal traffic dropped off a cliff just like this image shows, in fact probably a lot more so. Although I still do visit that small gaming sub, b/c while there is a version of it here, instead of like 5 posts a day we get at most 1 per week, which less than a handful interact with. So that is not an "exodus of users" so much as a (vast) reduction of interaction, which still impacts their advertising revenue and thus the continuity of Reddit as a corporate entity.

c) as people are saying, not everyone came to Lemmy/Kbin. Some went to Mastodon, others just stopped going online as much, and like myself I comment now a lot less than I used to, though I read just as much (here, not there). So just b/c the traffic did not come "here", does not mean that it did not leave "there". i.e., think of the shock of the event as making people regress more to lurking and not feel as comfortable interacting, especially given the lack of ability of smaller magazines (what are those called on Lemmy again?) here. Thus, even if they did not "go outside", they still may not be interacting on Reddit.

i got perma banned once for.... absolutely no reason. it got appealed when i asked why i was perma banned in my appeal

To me it also feels like the ratio of low effort content posts or reposts VS original content has changed considerably. At least when browsing /r/all.

George Floyd was murdered on May 25. COVID was ravaging the world. The presidential election cycle was in full swing. And I'm sure much more.

Do you do the sex? What's the saddest song ever? What's the sexiest sex ever? Sad song? Sex?

Nope. It just means there are bots left chatting amongst themselves ;)