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 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.
Point taken, and I’m definitely not disagreeing with you BUT…
Where did those high value users go then? They’re definitely not here
In my experience, they’re split between the Mastodon side of the Fediverse and the Lemmy side. On Kbin, which bridges both, and where you can follow users, you end up with a pretty rich feed if you follow enough people and places - I’ve got about 100 communities subbed and 300+ users and my feed is better than Reddit’s ever was.
Another thing to note is that your instance benefits from your discovery - it doesn’t start indexing posts from another instance until someone from the first instance subscribes to it. This means a lot of smaller instances get lost in the shuffle, but they’re out there - you just have to find them. I’ve noted that this is much more difficult to do on my Lemmy account than my accounts with other software, so you might benefit from an instance jump if things feel dry on your current account.
I’ll argue that people that left Reddit for better places did win. Lemmy itself is less susceptible to corporate BS shoved at end users.
I’m on Kbin, and feel that this shift is a majorly positive one for me both in short and hopefully in long term. I had two accounts, and one became a much more active than the other over the course of about 12 years. I dl’d my content, erased it, and left without looking back. I’ve used the more obscure acct to check on things a few times, but really don’t have time for that. Onward! We’ve got a Fediverse to build!
Similar here, I actually comment occasionally. More than that, I’ve gone back to self hosting multiple things, I’ve shifted away from Google, all good changes I think. Prompted by reddit changing the api price, who would have thought they’d have such a positive influence on me.
I wonder how many people, like me, ended up drastically reducing their social media use altogether, at long last. I still pop in here now and again, but I’m not spending anything like the amount of time I spent on reddit.
@Lowbird me as well! a good thing!
Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago
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.
Yeah, thr reduction of 90% maybe caused by covid recovery. But AskReddit, for example, has dropped off suddenly almost 50% in the end of July based on here https://subredditstats.com/r/AskReddit (scroll down to comments and post per day)
I haven’t posted to “my” subreddit since the protest. (Posted over 100 times on Lemmy tho.) I check in occasionally to make sure it hasn’t gone full Lord of the Flies, but…
The one thing I never understood is why did the Oliver subs go back to normal instead of sticking with Oliver. Finally, interest was lost in the Oliver jokes and traffic was going down. So it would have been the perfect time to enforce Oliver and cut into the ads traffic that way. News articles at the time didn’t show any indication that this was another moved forced by reddit admins so why did the mods seemingly cave in without cause?
