Site to track Subreddit's as they go dark

RedPander@lemmy.rogers-net.com to Technology@beehaw.org – 71 points –
reddark.untone.uk

Hopefully I'm posting this in the right place, but I see Reddit developments as Tech news right now.

Wanted to share a website that is tracking Subreddits that have/will be going dark. It even has a sound notification for when they change their status.

Edit: Adding the stream https://www.twitch.tv/reddark_247

Double Edit: Data visualization https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/

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It's sad though I truly enjoyed Reddit like obviously many here, but also to be fair I've also felt like the quality of posts and comments overall degraded and the whole thing turned into a big meme factory where only funny images with text and tiktok reposts really were uploaded.

The whole thing started going downhills as soon as the first tiktok reposts started flooding in to be fairly honest. Let's please not let this happen much here, unless of course in dedicated communities for that because everything has a place.

Also, this is my first ever post on Lemmy, hi šŸ‘‹

I feel like this still depended on community. There was plenty of more niche hobby specific communities that were enjoyable. r/coffee comes to mind for me or something like r/fountain pens. I still enjoyed r/Analog although that had itā€™s own issues.

Yeah there are going to be quite a few TTRPG subreddits that I will miss. I really hope that the fediverse will be able to grow enough that niche interest pages can thrive here like they did over on reddit.

Just flipped the switch (so to speak) on a couple subs I moderate, and the largest (just shy of 1m users) will be going dark in a few hours.

What surprised me most is how well the members are took it. To be fair the subs I moderated are typically quite tech-minded, so everyone is quite in-the-know with what is happening and why.

It makes me furious that a site built and maintained by the users is being exploited at the users' expense.

I hope Reddit bleeds money from this silly line they drew in the sand.

"6236/7265 subreddits are currently dark."

85.83%

That's a pretty good response from the subs.

I'm hoping that a great deal of mods out there will continue to stay dark if nothing changes. And I expect nothing from Reddit's admin team to change. Just let the site devalue for the rest of the month to bots posting the same garbage over and over.

I don't see myself going back to Reddit if they keep those subs closed down. However I do believe that if this "strike" goes on for longer than a week or so, the admins will forcefully replace each closed subreddit mods to make them live again.

I hope that if that actually happens they'll find no volunteers to actually mod those subs and realize they'll actually have to hire and pay the people that actually makes their site usable

blackout.photon-reddit.com

Damn. That is only a tiny little dip in the post/comment rate so far relative to the historical cycle. What, maybe 5%, assuming the vertical axis crosses at zero? Not terribly encouraging....

My partner is a casual reddit user; the experience change was immediately apparent. She got bored and switched to facebook because all of the niche communities that the larger subreddits repost from went silent.

My GF is also a pretty casual reddit user and she was pretty pissed about her favorite subs being closed.

This should be bumped.

The smaller/niche communities is what made Reddit interesting.

When those eventually decide to pack and the only vibrant communities are the meme subreddits etc then you would probably see a drop in usage.

The large subs and front page just consist of bots reposting the same old content. The bots are easy to tell apart from real people just by eye, so I'm sure that reddit either has no problem with that or that they made these bots themselves to hide the fact that actual users are becoming less and less.

I saw that too - hopefully the changes will show in the next ā€œupā€ cycle. Apparently the bots are out to play as well.

Iā€™ve continued to tell people: This wonā€™t kill Reddit in the sense of outright turning it into a ghost town. If your only goal is to make Reddit collapse overnight, youā€™re going to be disappointed. The quality content that many people here enjoy is not what makes up the frontpage of r/all or what a huge amount of passive users consume. Reddit has more than enough low quality trash to backfill the frontpage and keep users occupied.

Anybody migrating should focus on porting quality content. Let reddit live long and be a dumping ground.

I see this less as a damage to Reddit, and more as an opportunity to diversify, make people aware of the threat of centralised corporate-run platforms, and to build the federated internet alternatives a bit more, to give them momentum.

It's more about reaching a tipping point where adding a new user to something else (fingers crossed for Fediverse) makes it a palatable alternative for more than one redditor. The network effect is a thing, so it exists, and if enough people get kicked off of an app they like it's not impossible to hit.

Yeah, I was negatively surprised as well. Almost 60% of all big SFW subreddits closed, and still only a small percentage less posts and comments.

I'm guessing (hoping) the difference at peak will be larger. All we can do now is wait and see, unfortunately.

This is just beautiful to watch. For once reddit comes together to spite... reddit.

Time to sit back, relax, and watch the world Reddit burn šŸ˜Ž šŸæ

I wish someone or a dev could make this list in these website and propose lemmy/kbin equivalents for us the redditors to join instead. On the other hands mods of those subreddits if they want they can make a community over these platforms.

Sadly all the mods I asked before deleting my account did not respond or said they where not interested on migrating

It is probably a lot of learning for them also that they donā€™t want to commit. Once enough or dedicated communities form all will join. I have seen a few of subreddits that went dark opened discord servers. I have a few hobbies and there are already servers that are better than Reddit, which I hope attracts users here ( for me it is VR/AR and 3d printing.). I am going to invest in programming communities here at least until other communities grow.

My Reddit frontpage only contains a few minor subs still which are probably without an active moderator and some ā€žgoing darkā€œ announcements. Very noticeable.

blackout.photon-reddit.com seems to be down for me. Any idea what's up with that, or other places that are visualizing traffic?

I'm really confused by the chart on the site https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/ I understand the dip annotated with the red arrow, but I do not understand the rebound annotated with the green arrow... With that many sites down, it should not be possible to rebound to normal levels...

Because that dip isn't due to the blackout. Reddit was pretty hard down for about an hour.

update for 2nd day of the blackout

I will be paying attention to this the following couple days. I wonder how they are going to tell investor, lol.

I'd be curious to see an updated valuation

The site is broken atm, but yesterday when I check it it was about half way between the blackout and the normal volume. (might just because weekend people have more other stuff to do?)

Yeah that's possible. Quite frankly all of this is pretty moot for the time being, the real test is at the end of the month when the API changes take effect.

3 more...

Reddit is deddit.

Yeah I'm getting a "You Broke Reddit" message when attempting to old.reddit.com. I didn't break reddit 'you' broke reddit lol.

I donā€™t know about you, but streaming the ā€œDarkeningā€ is like the best thing ever. Just reading all the comments as viewers cheer on each subreddit.

When r/trees wend private I was thinking ā€œshit just got real.ā€

Anyway, I suggest watching the stream, if just for the cameraderie.

Thereā€™s a trees sub-lemmy but it only had pictures of actual trees when I checked yesterday

Damn, the arborists got here first this time.

Also a good opportunity to back it up everyone with just not visiting their site. I've added 127.0.0.1 reddit.com old.reddit.com www.reddit.com mod.reddit.com i.reddit.com to my hosts file so I don't accidentally follow a link to Reddit (I think they have a lot more subdomains, so the hosts file based approach isn't perfect, but hopefully good enough for a quick solution).

i.redd.it and v.redd.it might make sense as well. There is a bunch of subdomains and other domains (ā€¦oauth.reddit.com, ā€¦redditmedia.com, ā€¦), but they are only used if you connect the the main sites (i.ā€Æe., not hot-linked), so blocking those will be sufficient to block all reddit-traffic.