Do we at this point have any substantial data on just how many users Reddit actually lost due to this?
Any resources would be greatly appreciated.
As a sidenote, I’ll add that they certainly lost my account the second I couldn’t use RiF anymore.
You probably can’t judge the loss in user count anyway. 99% of the users never actively contribute anything, not even upvotes or so.
I tend to disagree. Most of the users that actually cared enough about the API changes to make the switch to Lemmy were powerusers. I think most casual lurkers use the official app anyway and didn’t care about the protests.
Hell naw, I’m a lurker (on Reddit). I used Apollo because I’m an IT guy and I can’t stand ads.
I feel like I actually should start interacting here though, because I’m not being over spoken / silenced by AI bots and algorithms
Edit: I am already halfway to my number of updoots on my Reddit account of 7 years… it’s working! Be the change you want to see!
I can’t stand ads and scabs, and I feel like a scab if I open reddit now.
Hopefully you’re right about the majority, but I’m also a lurker and it took me a single day without Apollo filtering away the ads for me to delete my few posts, my account, and throw in my lot with all of you! Can’t stand liars.
Hey, I’m a lurker and I used the official app (un-installed it the day I created an account on fedi, it was shit anyway). There’s still a moral ground attached to this. I don’t browse reddit anymore, and I did a final post in a niche community that I really like, a couple of weeks or so, in an attempt to lead them here, because I do miss that community and I contributed more there. There’s a bunch of good reasons people could stop using reddit, but imho what matters is that we build our communities in fedi and just forget about what happens to reddit.
All I can say is I was one of the technical users that asked obscure questions that had no relevant results when searching before posting, and I tried to answer any questions I could. I haven’t even visited reddit since the 9th of June and I never will visit it again. All of my searches on the internet include “-reddit” now too. I don’t care, fuck spez. My password was saved in Infinity, I don’t remember it, and I don’t want to. Whenever someone starts a class action lawsuit over CCPA I’ll file and join.
I had an 8 year old account with a few hundred thousand karma, deleted it on July 1st once BaconReader went down.
Switching to Lemmy makes me want to participate even more and hopefully foster more people to join.
I had an active 11 year old account that I deleted.
The final straw for me was an interaction with a ham fisted admin these last few days. It really and honestly is a toxic environment there, and the admins are following the lead from Spez, so it’s deeply embedded into the culture.
I wonder if you could have sold those accounts. You get done money and Reddit gets worse. Win-win.
Addicts? ::shakes head::
Powerusers ::nods::
No real way to tell, but I don’t think it would be immediately noticeable on Reddit. Like the satisfying “we killed reddit” probably isn’t going to happen. On the other hand, being here clearly have discoverd the Fediverse as replacement, so IMO it doesn’t matter what happens to Reddit now. (Not to say the drama/any issues Reddit ends up with won’t be endlessly entertaining)
Like the satisfying “we killed reddit” probably isn’t going to happen.
I used to think this until all of the recent blows they have had, such as the IAmA losses and Microsoft withdrawing their Minecraft support. With advertisers withdrawing and users leaving, I think they are going to have problems covering operating expenses in the near term that could lead to an implosion due to lack of funds.
Before all this started, Fidelity’s Reddit investment was devalued pretty heavily and they have had profitability issues. Tech companies in general are having investor problems due to interest rates so Reddit have problems is going to really scare away any risk-adverse investors. They have proven they cannot control their user base (which is good news for users) which scares advertisers away from content unfriendly to their interests. They just doubled their employees from like 1000 to 2000 in the past couple of years, which just adds astronomically to their operating expenses.
I think they make about $500 million in revenue and are still in the red. Even minor changes to this expense/income ratio can cause issues that make them suddenly insolvent with no one to bail them out.
What’s the Minecraft thing? I’m not on Reddit any more so missed that bit.
Minecraft devs left r/Minecraft and won’t use it as a source for news anymore. https://www.pcgamer.com/minecrafts-devs-exit-its-7-million-strong-subreddit-after-reddits-ham-fisted-crackdown-on-protest/
Good opportunity for them to host a separate instance with a Microsoft domain. That will contribute even more to their legitimately.
I definitely think getting interested in the fediverse is a long game. Think the death of Facebook. It was a slow burn between 2016 and 2020, involving lots of different communities moving at different times for different reasons
But…Facebook isn’t dead. I mean it’s dead to me, but it’s still going quite strong.
Really? Feels like a graveyard when I log in. I mean everyone over 65 still uses it and there are a lot of weird holdouts but all my friends moved over to instagram, which is so much worse than facebook ever was IMO
I mean it’s dead to me
Exactly. Whether or not Facebook or Reddit or Netflix or Twitter survive, thrive, or perish is irrelevant to me.
What matters is that they won’t profit off my data, they won’t sell any ads from my activity, and they won’t get a penny more of subscription money out of me.
If others wish to continue diving down those rabbit holes, that’s on them.
Well you can take the knowledge that Lemmy.world grew 60% following it, look at current numbers for the server, and know at least around 60% of that number has shifted some of their media habits away from Reddit.
But the full picture is unknowable outside Reddit corporate.
Probably more than spez was anticipating though…
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Same here. 13 years and 3 months on Reddit, but deleted my account in the 1st of July, and switched to Lemmy. It has it’s challenges related to the federation, mostly I foresee confusion about users with same name, having to run multiple accounts and maintain multiple subscription lists for some purposes and ofc the current performance/resource issues, but so far it’s working out. I miss a few nice subreddits but hopefully they will arrive.
That’s a good question about users with the same name. I haven’t wanted to try other instances because I thought I’d need to think up multiple new usernames… But maybe I don’t? Interesting.
You can have the same name across multiple instances. I assume in the background there is a @yourinstance.tld as part of the name, but all the clients I’ve seen show just the initial part of it. I could see some impersonation and confusion issues.
But probably not enough to make a bit immediate impact on Reddit. I’m more interested in long term impact, seeing if the people who left were big contributors, or just mostly lurkers
Don’t underestimate lurkers. They play a big role by upvoting, downvoting and reporting inappropriate content. They are the invisible force that keeps a website healthy and sane.
I feel seen
I Am Lurk.
Not only Lemmy but other instances and other sites as well. I know squabbles grew by quite a bit, beehaw grew, and so did Tildes. But unless we were able to gather information from everywhere, it’s impossible to know. What is heartening is that we do know that it was not an insignificant amount.
Looking at the stats for the subreddits I moderate, I can’t see any actual change in unique views since the apps shutdown
If there is a change, Reddit shouldn’t share the real numbers. Would be bad for business.
I didn’t fully quit reddit, but I’m going to Lemmy first and foremost and rarely go back to reddit for very specific communities. My reddit usage dropped by 90+% probably, but I’m not completely gone.
I’m sure the same is true for many other users as well, so simply counting the number of (active) users then and now won’t get even close to the actual loss in traffic and participation.
Same here. Since I was an Apollo user, there’s no loss of revenue though, and I haven’t posted much, barely any loss of new content.
https://the-federation.info/platform/73
The numbers do speak for themselves.
While it’s not huge, compared to reddits numbers, it’s a massive boost to lemmy. A lot of those leaving are more likely more active users. It’s bootstrapped Lemmy into a viable platform. It now has a critical mass of users to generate content.
Thanks for this. Those numbers indeed speak for themselves.
From a personal point of view the more I use Lemmy the more I like it. There are a lot of QoL features I really think is better here. Like this built in reply window, for instance.
The Active Users Ratio graph is not filling me with hope - if I’m reading it correctly there isn’t increased activity, just increased sign ups.
Total users have sky rocketed and iirc like 90% of users/people who log in to say vote, save and subscribe to communities are lurkers. Hell, I’ve been “lurking” since I’ve signed up.
Since there’s such a spike in users, and prior to the Reddit death, most users were power users. I’m surprised that the active user ratio didn’t decrease. (My 90% lurker figure would give a 0.1 ratio). The fact it near increased by .05 instead is wild.
I want to comment and submit content, I just feel like I don’t have anything of value to share. That tends to be why I lurk. Not sure if that’s the case for most other lurkers.
yea i feel the same way. heck, the only reason I’m leaving this comment is just to prove your point
I was mostly a lurker on reddit, but as others have inspired me to do, I comment and have made a couple of posts to help generate content.
Yeah we’d need to know post rate % or avg posts per posting user to understand what’s up.
Maybe 40% of reddit is lurkers? Maybe 5%?
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“Fuck you, I will do no such thing” he said. Cunningly marking his first post on the new platform.
…and my axe!
And my sax! (We need a good soundtrack)
It’s going to be hard to tell definitively, because so much traffic on the major platforms like Reddit are bots. As a percentage of overall traffic, the reduction may only be a few percentage points.
But all that traffic that is leaving are from Actual Humans. Humans who cared enough about their interactions to have preferences about how they engaged with Reddit. In a few years, Reddit will just be a bunch of bots talking to each other.
One of the founders of Reddit mentioned in an interview a while back that it was all bots when it started, to give the illusion of being populated when it was too new to have any users except the people who worked on it. From bots it came, and to bots it will return. The circle of life.
At least three: You, me, and some person who built this platform.
Disclaimer: It’s entirely possible two of the above individuals are bots.
Wait, could I be a bot too?? 😧
This statement is false
@IjonTichy Don’t think about it-don’t think about it-don’t think about it
Uh… True. I’ll go with true.
Good bot.
I have Wefwef now. I’m not lost, just on substitute.
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It’s like Apollo for Lemmy, I use it too. Sure there are some kinks to be ironed out and UX isn’t as smooth but I’m not going back to Reddit 😞
🙋♂️
There are dozens of us!
It’s only been three days since the API change. Give it a month and we might have a bit of usable data, but for precise information, we’ll need to wait a few months or even up to a year.
It actually hasn’t. The api hasn’t been changed. Reddit is such a shit show they didn’t make their own deadline. Apps that didn’t take themselves down in advance still work.
Theres still a wave to come I think.
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Weird. Several apps, such as infinity (plus others reporting ones that don’t plan to go subscription based are working still - boost, stealth, rif when logged out, and relay and someone said their bot was still chugging along), still work fine with no subscription. That, plus this post indicating that changes will over over the best few weeks, makes me feel like it’s not being revoked uniformly or smoothly.
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/14nbw6g/updated_rate_limits_going_into_effect_over_the/
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That’s fair, but people are experiencing no rate limits on certain apps and their bots are still working is what I am saying. As in, some api tokens have not been revoked. It hasn’t been done completely yet, only in a targeted way for some apps it seems. Though, I actually haven’t seen any developers say their api was revoked from them, only that they pulled out early as to not risk some weirdness with possible charges.
The apps I am talking about working are not instances where users have inserted their own api tokens and do jot have api exceptions.
Go over to the infinity subreddit. It’s just a ton of people asking why the app still works completely fine without a subscription or charged api update.
So, I think my original point stands. Many apps and bots work just fine because the api keys have not been pulled and api rate limits haven’t been put in effect since reddit didn’t make their own deadline to uniformly manage either thing.
I think the critical question is not so much how many users it lost, but how many contributing users? Given the majority of Reddit users are lurkers, you could easily lose half the content by losing only the top 5% of contributing users…
Very good point and this place seems like it’s getting a lot of the content contributors…
I don’t think Reddit is imploding overnight but there seems to be an element of death by a thousand cuts happening. I’ve left and burned out three old usernames and over ten years worth of posts/comments. I’ll still use it to find answers to things but increasingly over the last month the threads are peppered with deleted comments and gaps
I’ve stopped using it to look for answers to things. I’ve found that I can find all answers to games, electronics and such elsewhere. I may have to do a minute more digging. I deleted all my comments and quit going when the blackout happened.
This is not public information, you won’t know anything about that until the next quarterly reports. That being said if you go to the front page right now it seems pretty much like business as usual.
To be fair, with a website as huge as reddit, a 25% or even 50% decrease in user activity probably won’t be that noticeable from someone like us. Instead of 2 million posts a day, it’s not now 1 million. Or instead of 500k, it’s 250k. None of those are knew we could feasibly differentiate.
Maybe if you sit on r/all and keep track of how fast new posts are moving, but even then, the algorithm may still just move the same number of posts up and down the main pages. So even then, it would be hard to tell if usage is down.
Now obviously there’s no way it’s down that much. It’s significantly lower. But I’m just saying even if we pretend that it was down that much, it would look like business as usual.
Also, either way, I’m still glad to find this place. It feels nicer and offers what I wanted in a way reddit couldn’t.
Yeah you’re right that it wouldn’t be immediately noticeable but just because a few thousands of us jumped to Lemmy doesn’t mean there is any significant change on reddit. I checked on my most active communities and all the usual suspects are there, posting and commenting as usual. The amount of people that left reddit are probably a fraction of a percent.
The real question is how many power users and moderators left, the first are the ones that produce the most content, the second are the ones that prevent the place turning into a shithole. If an important fraction of those left, it WILL impact the site.
Precisely, the importance is if the mods stick around or not.
One sub I was in the Mod basically said a few weeks ago ‘I’ve had it with this, no offense guys but just run it how you want from now on’I’m retiring’. The users didn’t turn it into a protest sub but somehow it’s worse than that because it’s repetitive and boring.
So there’s a few old hands sticking around but I doubt there’ll be new people joining it. And I think that will be true for a lot of unmoderated subs, they won’t all get full of porn and spam, they’ll just become much less interesting
A saw a post a while back commenting on how many upvotes it was taking to get onto the front page of r/all having dropped, but not sure if there is any way to see stats from before API changes now.
The other method was looking at how many people are “here now” in each sub
