Reddit Activity Plummeted After The Protests - by Adam Bumas
Arotrios@kbin.social to 
Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 0 points – Last month marked the official end of the Reddit protests. Any subreddit that had changed its rules or gone dark — or forced its users to post exclusively about John Oliver — has now gone back to normal. On the surface, it seems like a complete victory for Reddit, but things aren’t so simple when a major element of that victory was forcibly removing moderators for dozens of communities. In fact, according to Reddit users, the protests have caused a major brain drain on the site. The question is: can you prove it? And the answer is: well, sort of, yes.
For the last six months, we've been tracking the top Reddit posts every month. When we first started, the subreddit with the most posts in the top 20 was r/OddlySatisfying, with three posts. As of last month, however, 10 of the top 20 posts all came from r/MadeMeSmile.
The fact that all of the top posts on Reddit are coming from the same subreddit, as far as we're concerned, means either people aren’t browsing as much or there just aren’t as many people on Reddit. But it was hard to tell which was which, since the actual number of upvotes on the most popular posts are pretty identical to where they were six months ago. But investigating that, I found that Reddit has always had certain caps on how many upvotes a post can get, which suggests that isn’t a good way to measure. Over on Subreddit Stats, however, we found a much better way of working this out.
Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.
This chart from SubredditStats show the daily comments and posts for 5 major subreddits: r/news, r/facepalm, r/mademesmile, r/oddlysatisfying, r/mildlyinfuriating.
And that’s how we've now ended up with a Reddit full of r/MadeMeSmile. And, just in case you're curious about what that looks like — four of the top five Reddit posts were reposted TikToks.
Reddit was one of the last major spots online where you could expect to interact with people who aren’t making money off you. Which also why Reddit was able to completely replace its existing moderators since they were virtually all unpaid.
We’ve talked a lot about Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification”, but he was only talking about individual platforms. Larger trends like AI and crypto (or even pivoting to video) have a cascading effect on the process. One big platform trying something is enough to legitimize it, and soon everywhere you can go has a noticeably worse user experience. If people stay off Reddit, then the site definitely didn’t “win” the protests, but neither did anyone else.
When Reddit announced the API pricing that kicked all this off, they justified it by talking about lucrative AI tools trained on Reddit data, saying, “we don’t need to give all that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free”. Ironically, that’s exactly what you do every time you go online, and it looks like a lot of people have decided to choose the same thing for themselves by staying off Reddit.
I've been on Reddit a few times since the third party fiasco. (looking up old responses to help with an issue I had) It seems just as lively, but something is definitely different. Everyone seems like bots, or one person running the same account. I just can't explain it, glad I'm gone though, it's just not fun anymore.
I want to believe this is due to the protests and people noping out (and I bet some of it is) but this observation ignores the Covid effect.
Reddit aside, basically every online community I frequent has seen a major dip following the end of the worst of the pandemic. Slack and Discord communities I have been in for years have tanked considerably. Tons of YouTubers I follow have dropped off majorly in the frequency of new videos. Forums are way sleepier. Engagement on a lot of social sharing platforms I use is way down.
I think a big chunk of this is people being able to go out into the real world again and also having spent a couple years being chronically online because that was kinda all there was to do. And now they're wanting anything but that.
All that said, I resigned from my mod positions on a few pretty large subs, wiped my 120k karma account of all comments and posts, and haven't submitted a single thing to the site in about 2-3 months.
Good riddance, tbh
I would have a slightly different takeaway from this - it's the vocal users, the ones that commented and posted and were active contributors, who were pissed off and left. I would wager a good amount of lurkers who idly browse memes and upvote content have remained.
In the short term, Reddit still ends up with ad impressions, no change, there are a ton of lurkers. But in the long term, this becomes a bit of a death spiral - less new content for the lurkers and they're more likely to be peeled off onto a more active platform with fresher memes, and the remaining contributors have less people to talk to and so they, too, are peeled off elsewhere.
This also means, if Reddit wanted to curate and sell their text data for AI training, that there's suddenly much less of that coming in. Whoops.
I've also seen some mentions of it being caused by the new API changes messing with the tracking so not allposts and comments are counted. Anyone has better insight on this?