‘Front page of the internet’: how social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 846 points – How social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit
theguardian.com

‘Front page of the internet’: how social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit::A mass user protest six months ago over technical tweaks had big downstream effects, and now the ‘front page of the internet’ is changed for ever

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Despite these concessions, dozens of Redditors promised to stop using the site altogether without access to their favorite browsing apps. But according to data from the website analytics firm SimilarWeb, traffic has largely remained consistent to the platform, aside from a pronounced dip during the blackout

Dozens of us!

I wonder if thats because most of the traffic was just bots all along who obviously aren't going to leave in protest

Am I crazy or did the number of bots and 'new users' ramp up quite a bit around the protest also? Moderation was basically nonexistent, I would see obvious bots and trolls stay around when they would have been banned in no time before. I find it hard to trust any data on Reddit.

If I remember right, there was a spam detector bot or similar which I'm sure was third party and it either went off altogether or the project was suspended after accessing the API was going to come in.

I only go back to Resdit when my Google search doesn't take me where I need to go.

Which, unfortunately, is far too often. In my recent experience..

I literally use Reddit to fix Google Search results when I actually need an answer. At the very least I'll typically find the starting string. Though that's less due to the quality of Reddit and more because of its longevity.

Sometimes Lemmy pops up on my google search! That always makes me smile

I've often found removed responses, which is a good thing, just makes my quest to find an answer harder.

At least use a redirect extension that gives you an alternative, lighter frontend. Teddit might be mostly gone, but there are still Libreddit instances alive and active. And on Android, Stealth still works.

The data is coming from the reddit admins, they have an interest in not looking like the idiots they are. Basically I call bullshit, I think they're lying for the IPO that'll never actually happen.

A third party website analytics company probably couldn't track the traffic of the users who left in the first place- the whole ordeal was about unofficial apps and API usage.

That's actually a great point. If everyone using the apps bailed it would be a huge number decline that wouldn't register as even a blip on similarweb so it's a terrible metric.

Yep. Haven't touched my account. Only time I go there is if a Reddit result is the only decent result of a search. But I don't browse reddit at all.

That's probably cause the userbase was flooded with bots to make up the difference