60% of subreddits are still dark! Reddit activity down 30%

operator@kbin.social to Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 510 points –

The reddit blackout is even more effectivte than expected! 5177/8829 (~60%) of subreddits are still dark [1] and the posts per minute are down to 1000 from 1400 [2].

This is huge. Subreddits were supposed to be back up yesterday. I personally missed Reddit the first day but now I am super comfortable here.

Glad to have found a new place to hang out!

Edit: Reddit has 100k subs, 60% out of those who officially signed up

[1] https://reddark.untone.uk/

[2] https://www-heise-de.translate.goog/news/Reddit-Blackout-dauert-an-30-Prozent-weniger-Aktivitaet-Werbebranche-wartet-ab-9189048.html?wt\_mc=rss.red.ho.ho.rdf.beitrag.beitrag&\_x\_tr\_sl=de&\_x\_tr\_tl=en&\_x\_tr\_hl=en-US&\_x\_tr\_pto=wapp

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When you lose 30% of your users because you got greedy about how ‘unprofitable’ your own app was, it’s gonna hurt.

True punishment would be active, content rich posters zeroing out their posts and comment history. By doing so, the Google searches - which currently refer a ton of traffic to the site - will start to fade. The body of knowledge- users knowledge, not Reddit’s- is what drives new traffic to the site. I plan to remove my contributions later this month, presuming nothing changes.

15 year redditor, though only with ~250k karma. Scrubbed the crap out of my account. I'll probably still use reddit on desktop for as long as old.reddit exists, but for mobile I'm definitely trying out alternatives.

How do I give Reddit gold? Hopefully this works🥈

In all seriousness "this is the way"

I've been on Reddit for 13 years, and I'm hesitant to remove everything, in case I want to revisit some of my old posts/comments. Is there a way to archive your own content?

I left Reddit but didn't scrub any posts. Seemed a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Although I do understand why others thought otherwise.

Huffman has recently made it clear that he wants to monetize user data, so I think that's a good reason to delete it, imho. I can still understand leaving it up as a courtesy to other users, but deleting all your content is a valid action imho.

Until the 30th you have the API, write up a little script. Either get the raw data or store a snapshot of the post on the website

I used Power Delete Suite to back up and delete my content. Note that there seems to be a bug in the archive export process though. I had to follow the advice on this issue to pull my full CSV backup.

Just had a go with Power Delete Suite, but the export is kind of minimal, so I think I'll roll my own with the API, while the clock ticks.

/r/DataHoarder was encouraging that last I checked.

Isn't that ironic

They've already got a copy, I guess.

A copy of all reddit posts & comments is being passed around there. Everything up until March 2023 or so. Unfortunately no community here yet.

Anyone knows more?

Edit: See https://the-eye.eu/redarcs/ and the explanation by r/DataHoarder (linked somewhere below)

I think reusing that data by anyone would be a very shady move. Not everyone who posted on reddit wants their posts and comments to float around in various places without their consent. I know posting online always poses the risk that what you post will be archived somewhere but I still think no one should build any new service on that data.

You are absolutely right. But the data is out there anyways. Reddit keeps copies as much as Google and other creepy spiders. The amount of aggregated and unified knowledge these dump contain is astonishing. For personal research or just preservation.

There are plenty of sites where you can already see old, deleted comments. So barely a new risk.

I’m wondering if that data could be given to archive.org for posterity (if legal of course).

The datahoarder community is on it, the posts asks for active support

I wonder if they moved here too. Would be nice, really enjoyed being part of that community.

It's a pitty there aren't many (any?) subreddits that are "officially" endorsing a specific community in lemmy (or magazine in kbin) for migration.

The few I've seen that have promoted alternatives usually just say something like "lemmy," or provide a whole host of alternatives, resulting in a wide spread across platforms for the few that do migrate.

I bet any post encouraging a migration would get yanked very quickly! The best bet is to pm people who were quality contributors to the sub, to encourage them to continue in a platform that's open.

Thats true. I guess they are all till trying to figure out what to do. We also need to give @eduard and the other platforms more time to scale the infrastructure, setup moderation where needed and address issues... Imagine just 10% of reddit users & activity migrating over here in a matter of weeks.

Man, you know it's bad when even a sub based on data preservation is saying, "Nuke it"

Same here, going to do it a few days before the API change just in case they pull some crap to prevent mass scrubbing losses

GDPR (for EU users) and CCPA (for Californian users) both have the right "to be forgotten", which means they must delete all your data upon request. Even if they block the third-party bulk deletion sites that use their API, they should still delete all your data upon request, at least if you're in a jurisdiction with such a requirement.

It isn't that powerful. They don't have to remove comments or posts if they don't contain any personal data that you can be identified with.

Don't they have to delete all "my" data though? I guess I'm not sure of the specific wording of the laws, but at my workplace we delete all data that's directly related to the user (data they created, plus any other data collected or logged about them), even if it doesn't contain any personal data. The systems that handle this are super complex so I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of companies don't handle it well.

Yeah, but with what they've pulled off so far they have been perfectly following the playbook for a "data unlawfully retained" scandal for reddit. Some GDPR fine.

Kind of sad to lose all that knowledge though. I wish we had a backup.

I mean there's always archive.org and the various other internet caches that contain a large portion of Reddit's knowledge.

Why not sooner then later, holding out gives reddit hope.

There are a few useful extensions and browser plugins that help automate editing your past comment history and posts to be blank, the same tool then deletes the post and comment for you.

Don't leave anything behind IMO. I know I did not.

The other significant factor is that even their recently-slashed valuation was based on some degree of projected user growth. If you're trying to IPO and your growth has flattened, it's bad bad news. If your engagement numbers are actively moving backwards, that's catastrophic.

Looking at posts per minute seems like a great way to judge the effect though. I anticipate Reddit, Inc. will attempt to downplay the effect by focusing on numbers that take engagement out of the picture, like Monthly Average Users. If you touch the site once in the month, even by absent-mindedly clicking on a Google result, you'd get counted in that for June. And they wouldn't report the July numbers until August because, golly it's an incomplete month. And by then, their hope is that the world will have moved on.

Internally, I'm sure there aware of the impact. But externally, I believe they'll cherrypick favorable metrics to try and control the narrative for the investing & advertising communities.

I anticipate Reddit, Inc. will attempt to downplay the effect by focusing on numbers that take engagement out of the picture

You pretty much described every corporation in the history of mankind. This is what they always do.

They lost more than 30% of their actual users. Of the remaining traffic a portion is just bots. Maybe 10%? Maybe 30%? No idea, but not all of the remaining traffic is real people.

I don’t know. Since the API pricing has not been applied yet, I assume many boys are still running.

The test will be if they actually lost the users or just lost them for a few days.

Only to add some clarification: reddark is only showing you the list of subs that announced they'd go dark versus the amount of those subs that have gone dark.

The exact number is hard to pin down, but reddit claims to have "100k+" active communities.

So 60% of the subs that said they'd go dark are still dark.

Correct. At best estimate that's 5%of reddit communities but the impact in users might be much larger as a lot of those 100k subs have just 1 or 2 subs

I deleted my 12 year old account history after the "AMA" with Spez and will be fully deleting my account on the 30th. That being said I clicked back on reddit today and browsed a bit of what was up and after spending the last few days on kbin and beehaw I don't think I can go back.

The amount of toxicity that I was putting up with on reddit was astounding. I can't believe I didn't notice it was so bad, even on the smaller subs I was active in. I always have referred to reddit as a cesspit with islands of good content, but I think the landscape changed while I wasn't paying attention.

I do hope the protest works and 3rd party devs can continue their wonderful apps, but reddit is kind of over for me regardless. The fediverse somehow feels like the early internet, kinda like going home.

Let's not have too rose colored glasses. A lot of it is because lemmy and kbin are tiny and haven't received their "eternal September" moment yet. It's bound to get worse so I hope our moderation tools will evolve sufficiently until then

While you're not wrong, the fact that it's an open and decentralized protocol and not a corporate-controlled silo makes the ultimate outcomes of the fediverse unpredictable. Better for actual human users, I think, and at least it'll be interesting to watch and participate in while those outcomes develop (likely over years if not decades).

We'll see. The big problems will arrive when it becomes valuable for spammers

Right there with you, also had a 12 year old account and deleted it. It's absurd how this is going. Federated definitely feels more tight knit and less just a media consumption platform.

The fediverse is definitely feeling like the early internet, and it's really taken me by surprise. Even though I reminisced about it and lamented it's loss, I think I never really understood just how much I missed it.

It's like 1995 all over again, and it's glorious.

Thank you for eloquently putting into words what I've been feeling.

The day before the blackout, I was feeling a lot of grief. Reddit had been my "home" for more than a decade, and I thought i would miss the community. Instead, I feel…lighter? Things are much nicer here!

100% more nicer. Les toxic and definitely a feeling of humanity. Hard to explain, but the majority of comments over at reddit just don't feel human. Needed to change in order to realize.

I'm having a similar experience in realising how much toxicity I've normalised on reddit. Going back on there now feels so absurd.

That ama was the most unprofessional bunch of dogs shit I have ever seen from the ceo of a multimillion dollar company.

multimillion

Multibillion. Well, theoretically.

Agree! I cleared out all the outrage, political and "negative" subreddits I was subbed to last month and... there wasn't much left. I don't feel like user engagement is being gamed here, it's nice.

Just a heads up, those 8k subs are just the ones that pledged to go dark. The actual total number of subreddits is much higher.

Still, 60% of subs still participating is much higher than I had expected.

Came to clarify the same. Title is very misleading.

Agreed though, actually surprised at how many are still dark.

I also didn't expect that large of a percentage to continue. It's very rare nowadays for people to resist capitalism and just end up complicit in the end like the Netflix situation.

I'm glad Reddit has a backbone against its tyrant.

I boycotted Netflix when they did the price hike and said they were ending password sharing and haven’t looked back. Been sailing the open seas ever since.

Still, 60% of subs still participating is much higher than I had expected.

It doesn't surprise me. Never underestimate apathy.

This is seriously impressive! I think a lot of us were worried this would all collapse after a couple of days. I don’t think they knew how many of us were looking for an excuse to quit. Their mobile site is trash. Their desktop site is trash. Their mobile app is trash. Forcing us to use them was just not a strong bargaining proposition.

Comment levels are back to normal. But those creating the posts, initiating engagement are down and it will probably become worse once the API changes are in effect.

Subreddits are dark and posts will disappear from the Google Index reducing traffic to the site. Many big subs, as r/formula1 or r/apple to name a few, are dark indefinitely.

Moderators, those who keep the platform more or less peaceful, are sick of it - as you can see in the blackout rates.

The casual normie or lurker will see a drop in content, the site will gradually or exponentially loose its top value users and become a Facebook.

Or not. We'll know in a few months to come, the internet is a fast paced place.

I agree, it definitely was uncomfortable moving from reddit at first, but seeing how familiar the site was, and how much nicer the community is, it feels more like an upgrade than just swapping platforms.

Also, I didn't expect the protest would have so much of an impact, but I'm all for it!

You can feel humans behind these posts. No AI generated content. No toxicity, no "in conclusion" and stupid summaries. Amazing

I feel that so much.

No bots. No companies or agendas. Too small to be interesting to them as yet. I like it.

I’m with you. It really is amazing how much kinder this community is. I love it!

Subs going dark is great but keeping users off is the real goal. I'm not even going to view anything Reddit until corporate pulls back

reddit is dead, it happens to all websites eventually and this is a long time coming. I'll never go back, I'm happy to have found the Fediverse.

but damn, if that was really it (hypothetically), it was a rapid fkn downfall. sure they stumbled for a while but nowhere from falling.

The big test for users is going to be once the apps shut down. Right now, it's still very convenient to browse whatever is left on reddit. On July 1st...we'll see.

https://reddark.untone.uk/ There are big subreddits indefinitely dark. The drive will reduce once google stops indexing hidden posts. And the moderation bot situation is another story...

The -30% value is taken from the peak value, but doesn't look at the total amount posted per day.

So I took the data from the blackout.photon-reddit site source.

It seems that it makes a Reddit Api call every Minute searching the newest Post and Comment and calculates both per Minute rates.

I wanted to see the effect the Blackout had over the day, so I summed the data and plotted it: Seems like between 11th and 12th June the comments/day diminished by -19.2%. The posts/day saw a decline of -8.9%

Reddit Blackout Graph

The sub with the most Activity was probably Askreddit

AskReddit Comment Activity

Almost 30% drop in posts per minute probably demonstrates better the real impact this blackout has had. And that's seems pretty drastic. Reddit must feel the impact.

Revoking the API really felt like one of those, "pull-up the ladder," moments. The API access and the choice of 3rd party UI's it allowed seemed like part of Reddit's initial community-focused strategy, a method to drive people there from other platforms by being more open and accessible by allowing people to experience it the way they wanted. Then, they stupidly pulled a Digg by revoking that with no way back.

2 days will do nothing, give them a week next time we do this

Screw a week, we should have gone indefinite from the start. Spez would have pissed himself

No, he would have immediately replaced the mods with internal people and internal bots, and turned off the "private" option. Frankly, I expect he'll do that anyway, or, in 30 days, a whole bunch of them will be going up on RedditRequest - with a new group of powermods.

Let them. It will make their operations more expensive and the quality worse. Sure, users will stay, just as how there are still people on 9gag, Stumbleupon, FunnyJunk, etc, but this is all an engagement game and if the site is less engaging, fewer people will engage and other alternatives will get better as more redditfugees make their exodus

That’s fine, actually. If Reddit wants to “hire” mods then they can actually pay them, which hurts their bottom line. (And they probably should have done that a looong time ago, for the largest subs anyways.)

If they just replace the mods with more unpaid volunteers, that will be a shitshow in itself - just imagine the people who would want to do that “job” but without any of the effective tools.

Either way, 🍿

I have to wonder how much of what’s left is just repost bots and spam bots. I’ve noticed since the blackout and I’ve stopped opening the app much, I’ve gotten a lot more of those stupid onlyfan bots following me.

Well, bots will be shut of as well.

Unless they are Reddit bots.
There are stories (not sure of their truth) of regional subs being started and filled with reposts translated to the regional language - to the point of idioms not making sense when translated.
There are pictures of a while string of comments from different accounts saying "time to dust off my laptop and use the web version I guess" (or something like that).

I have absolutely no doubt that Reddit is using paid actors or AI actors to generate/push content/interactions

That allegedly happened recently with some German language subreddit, the admins had prepopulated it with badly translated comments from a bunch of bot accounts they control. I never actually verified that was true and don't know German to verify, but that's at least a recent allegation I've seen within the past several months that is supposed to be backed by evidence.

The issue is you lot. I've been perusing all these new sites. Everywhere I go I see reddit mentioned and all the comments say exactly the same thing.

I like the protest. "I have visited reddit"

You aren't protesting if you keep going to it. You are an active users. Your click your ad revenue your engagement is not a protest.

In order to protest do not access the site. No app no website no third party. That hurts them. You can't protest but keep going on the site.

It's 3 days. It's tough. I've honestly struggled something stupid. J probably spend about 12 hours on and off reddit. Whenever I get a minute I hope on. First thing in the morning and last thing at night.

This is affirmative strike action. We are on the picket lines.

DO NOT CROSS THE POCKET LINE.

or it's not a strike

The fact that hundreds of thousands of users - probably the most valuable ones - are not using reddit (actively) for a few a days now is just astonishing. Sure, the amount of aggregated information over there is still huge so no one can be blamed for casually looking for something specific.

But those users here are the ones initiating the engagement, creating the posts and providing valueable and original content. That dropped drastically.

The majority of users only lurk and comment. Or are bots.

Yup. I've gone on Reddit a few times in the past couple days, but mostly wound up there due to working on electronics projects and search results from Reddit having the information I needed. The only actual engagement I've had with the site has been in the form of comments encouraging people to come over here.

Conversely, I recently posted a massive infodump over on /m/PS2 in order to help kick-start that community.

I mean it's great and all just don't forget we're not here purely as anti-redditors, we're also here to build the new community. Not looking back is the only way to move forward

Thank you for saying this! This post is merely to demonstrate the power of a unified community. The reddit community came together stronger than anyone expected and has ever happened.

Check those stats next month when people can't use RIF, Appolo, etc.

According to the the article's own source, https://blackout.photon-reddit.com, traffic is pretty much back to what it was before the black out. Not sure where they are getting that large drop from. Unless they are cherry picking a high start and finishing somewhere in the middle of the normal daily ebb and flow.

interesting. nevertheless an undeniable amount of big subs are staying down indefinitely. stumbled upon the r/ModCoord thread earlier, r/formula1 or r/apple just to name a few

I think I've settled here. But I'm glad people are putting up the fight regardless.

Gotta fry the greedy porky boy /u/spez

Been away from Reddit since Monday. I do not mis it.

Same. Missed in the first day maybe but out of habbit. You can see the growth in the community here compared to just a few days ago. Rich engagement, no toxic users and interesting & diverse content

Wait, really? I keep hearing that the whole thing was a disappointment. Hopefully people stick it out long enough to actually force some change, then.

It gets harder and harder to tell what the truth is in this age of disinformation and astro-turfing. It seems like there's a pretty clear motive for certain interested parties to take the wind out of the sails, so keep your bullshit detector turned on for now.

Edit: Now that I think about it, this probably applies in both directions.

Undoubtably. For example, sure posts might have dropped but comments/active users haven't. We focus on posts because it fits our narrative. They focus on comments/active users because it fits theres. Who's actually correct? Both and neither. Only time will tell who is actually right. God do I hope its us but we will see.

We will see but personally I found my new place here - sure I'll lurk around reddit when i need something specific, but thats it ^^

I noticed something weird earlier. I'd taken to doomscrolling r/all and just resigning myself to removing the maximum 100 subreddits roughly in order of annoyance. I had 99 blocked subs before the blackout, and now there are only 69. I don't think private subs would disappear from there, so... maybe those 30 subs just got axed in their entirety.

Either way... nice.

It felt really good to delete my reddit account. I hadn't logged in or posted in months, and just lurked for a while. I was amazed at how toxic it had become. Reddit angries up the blood! (to paraphrase Grampa Simpson)

I agree and you aren't really aware of it until you are gone for a bit. I'm convinced the algorithm promotes some toxicity as it likely drives more engagement, which in turn promotes ad revenue. kbin feels like real human engagement. I replaced all of my reddit comments with a mild protest statement. Will likely delete on June 30th.

any guesses to when the admin demote the mods?

as soon as they realize they really needed them and now they are gone.

as soon as they realize the subs stay dark and traffic from search engine drop.

as soon as the mods can't use bots anymore.

Probably earlier than we think but still unexpected.

For me this blackout should have 6 months at minimun. 3 days do nothing at all.

Many subs stay dark indefinitely. Had over to r/ModCoord to get an impression. r/formula1, r/apple, just to name some of the big ones.

I'm surprised the admin haven't taken over and unprivated subs and demoted mods. Any guesses to when that'll happen?

It happened once but I haven't heard of any other cases

Keep this shit up! Blackouts won't mean anything to Huffman if we all come back after 48hrs.

Not hard to keep it up. Nothing dragging me back to reddit. the only thing i am missing is the immense amount of aggregated information

I wish it were easy for me. Just in these last few days from typical searches I do online, reddit is at or near the top of the results list with exactly what I'm looking for.

Where i the issue in casually looking for info? Use an adblocker and reddit doesn't directly profit. The more the community grows here, the less you'll lurk over at reddit

Reddit admins gone an fucked up here with this grandstanding, ChatGPT is here now and its turning a bunch of us amateur coders into a more powerful force, im currently using ChatGPT4 to help me write an application that will create a sum and review system of Lemmy user accounts

Be sure to double-check anything that ChatGPT4 creates. It's good at being plausible but not so good at being accurate.

Yeah, I've been using it for PowerShell scripts for a few weeks now, and while it's great for snippets or small functions, it's been less reliable than a first year college student for anything in depth. It's a fantastic tool, but still far away from a replacement of knowledge.

I don't think this data is correct. Yes, I observe a certain number of reddit-mods who hysterically close comments and ban dissenters. But there are a large number of sane people.

I've been slowly using reddit less and less as I've been getting accustomed to Lemmy and while it definitely has its problems I'd rather deal with those than let reddit think they can push around the people who make their site even possible to exist

@operator @daniel I have not used reddit since it went dark.

I am actively looking to supplement my need to connect to random others and take on interesting things from other places.

There is a definite uptick in my use of Mastodon, NetNewsWire, and reading various news sites.

I am also going to cancel my reddit premium which I've been paying for years.

I find it especially funny that the forcibly re-opened r/AdviceAnimals is constantly reminding everyone how douchey Reddit is behaving.