Reddit CEO: We're Sticking With API Changes, Despite Subreddits Going Dark

0485@lemmy.world to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 274 points –
Reddit CEO: We're Sticking With API Changes, Despite Subreddits Going Dark
uk.pcmag.com
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It blows my mind that Reddit can look at 90% of its communities going dark in some way and think, "yeah, this is fine."

EDIT (AGAIN): Thank you all for the comments on total subs. It's still clearly not 90%, but it still appears to be a significant portion of the active Reddit community. For the interested, check out the comments below for stats. :)

It might be as Louis Rossmann said, it was a mistake to say "we're going black for two days. They should've just says "were going black until you cange the rules again".

Abstaining for two days is enough to break a habbit.

Reddit's traffic might not recover for a while.

Of course it's up to the user to take action and abstain but if I open Reddit I see posts and can mostly scroll through my feed like it's any other day. If I wouldn't have known subreddits went private (and they didn't sticky a message) I might have not even noticed since I'll just see posts from subreddits who don't participate instead. The power that makes Reddit so good is working against the community effort right now.

The first thing I did this morning was open BaconReader from my homescreen before realizing what day it was. I replaced BaconReader with Jerboa to try and break the habit. It's not easy and I think Reddit knows it.

Is this for real? I wonder if different people's r/all look different. Mine is a ghost land. I would know something is up instantly. There's like 20 posts on my front page with 0 up votes from random ass subreddits I've never heard of. The content of the posts on the front page is wildly different than normal too.

I never use r/all. But I just checked and most of the top posts I saw yesterday seemed to be there still, so maybe there's indeed not much going on.

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Lots are just going dark indefinitely so hopefully it hurts them. I went to look on there this morning and their server response is worse than Lemmy atm so I dunno what's going on.

Loading full web pages takes more server processing power than API access.

This is browser and RIF just seems weird because blackout should mean less user load.

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There are absolutely not 2.8 million active subreddits. I just spent like an hour trying to find data on this. Nobody cites their sources. I used a dump of subreddit statistics from 2018, when there were just over a million subreddits. (Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/ListOfSubreddits/comments/8gzmmv/i_created_a_better_csv_textspreadsheet_list_of/)

There were ~34,000 subreddits with more than a 1000 subscribers. And 100,000 subreddits with more than 125 subscribers.

Looking at https://subredditstats.com/ the top 5000 subreddits make up about 30% (based on an estimated 840,000 posts a day by some reddit user on a subreddit that's currently dark so I can't give a good link) of the daily posts and surely far more than 30% of the daily traffic.

This makes sense to me. I was wondering how many were active, engaged communities and how many were shells or ghost towns.

There are, apparently, 2.8 million subreddits. About 8,000 are dark, meaning that's just over one quarter of one percent of subreddits. Even with some of the largest subs participating, I wouldn't be surprised if there is no massive dip in traffic. There are enough subs still open with enough mass appeal that most people will just look at some other subs for a few days. And I'll be honest, even though I've made an account both here and on kbin, I know I'll still use old.reddit (with RES and an adblocker at least) most of the time, simply because I doubt any of the subs I actively look at will do any meaningful migration that would lead to a similar level of discussion.

Hmm, 2.8 million subreddits, but how many are ghost towns? I wonder if anyone has a measurement in terms of monthly active users or something along those lines.

Reading comment above yours i dont think the 2.8million is correct and it also states that there are only 100,000 subreddits with over 125 subscribers and only 34,000 with more tham 1000 subs. Of the roughly 8000 subreddits that went dark there are someof the biggests subscriber counts woth some having millions of subscribers. I think based on that that its actually quite a hefty number.

It's also worth noting that many of those massive subs, especially the default subs, have lots of overlap in subscribers. r/funny with 50 million and r/aww with 30 million does not necessarily equal 80 million people because there are millions, probably even tens of millions, of people who are subbed to both.

Of all the subs I was subscribed to, there were I want to say only about 10 that didn't take part in the blackout. I unsubscribed to all of them. I am now subscribed to only subs that either took part in the blackout, or in one case one that opted to remain public (due to the nature of its contents) but is blocking all submissions for the next couple days.

For me, once RIF stops working, reddit will be dead to me. I will never install their official app, and 99% of the time I'm on reddit is on mobile. I have no doubt that old reddits days are numbered as well and that was the remaining 1%.

Not for long you won't. RES and old.reddit are on the chopping block too.

IDK, he said in the AMA that old reddit isn't going anywhere, and even if he's lying I don't think he would immediately do a 180 and kill it. The way I see it, it will probably be around for the foreseeable future.

He was just bullshitting about API changes in April, he's absolutely lying about old.

Well if that ends up being the case, then I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Wait WHAT.

Yeah, it's kinda crazy. I support the blackout but deep down I know nothing of substance will come of it. Their dip in traffic is probably not much worse than when a major city loses power.

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