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.
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)
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
People like Instagram over Facebook because it’s much, much harder to share links to ragebait on Instagram.
The secret sauce though is that one out of every 3 reels is ragebait. just a different kind that you cant get away from because you’re so addicted to the scroll feature
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.
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.
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…
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
Indeed.
I Am Lurk.
By definition lurkers don’t do any of that. A lurker literally just looks at stuff
That user you described is still a contributor, you could perhaps call them a curator or something but they aren’t a lurker.
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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.
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.
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.
…and my axe!
And my sax! (We need a good soundtrack)
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.
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“Fuck you, I will do no such thing” he said. Cunningly marking his first post on the new platform.
I’m not hating what I’ve accidentally caused here
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 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.
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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
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.
Eventually but at the moment most users are using both Lemmy and Reddit but soon the quality of content will shift from reddit to Lemmy and that will be the end of reddit. Post quality memes, questions and answers to kill reddit quickly
Post quality memes, questions and answers to kill reddit quickly
Uhhh, about that…
*hides beans*
imagines himself as an old man, picking at his ears “Ay? Wassat? Post quality beans?” Shrugging, and humbling under my breath while going to the cupboard to take a photo… “Not sure how that’ll help, but I’ll do me best.”
I hadn’t saved a meme from Reddit in a looooong time.
Joined lemmy July 1st and have been filling my phone with memes.
This place seriously reminds me of old Reddit. We don’t need a huge influx of users. Maybe just a few more but it’s pretty much perfect as is.
this ^^. even if we peel off 5% in a relatively even scrape across all the interests that’s enough content for me to scratch the itch daily.
I think it’s a good chunk but not enough to outright kill the site.
The shitshow that was Spez’s AMA certainly drove away a few users, but I think many more were hoping that they’d dial back the API changes at the eleventh hour to allow third-party apps to at least coexist.
I’ve been keeping track of this tracker and since July 1, peak comments/post per minute have definitely gone down. Although as the site mentions, you really shouldn’t draw any firm conclusions from that. Just interesting to see.
This is impossible to know. It is more important to see what Lemmy is getting more so than what Reddit is loosing. At least on the fediverse the number is realistic and not something for the shareholders.
Couldn’t agree more. People here need to be okay with the possibility that Reddit continues to be popular even though it will continue to be the same scummy company that treats its users like cattle. Those of us who care about that kind of stuff are a minority of the users. There are likely tens of thousands of people who lurk Reddit, click the ads, and don’t even know about the API debacle… and that’s okay, we should all let it go.
I quit reddit on my phone, and I’m never looking back. I’m still browsing Reddit with RES on my PCs though. So a drastic reduction in use.
Reddit feels like different now compared to a week ago. Browsing a new fresh site opened my eyes to how shit r/all are. Even with blocked subreddits a new hate fueled subreddit emerges every week.
Well seems simple enough. You look at how many new users Lemmy got and subtract that from whatever reddit numbers are online. Only posters/commenters count for Lemmy activity, and the number of lurkers is likely several times bigger. Anyway so based on what I see online, Lemmy has about 50k active users, maybe up to 10x more lurkers. So like half a million users maybe. Reddit probably has 55 million users. So that’s still 11x bigger than Lemmy
So if I’m even remotely in the ballpark, Lemmy managed to grab like 1% of the reddit userbase & the management won the mainstream crowd as usual. Of course Lemmy isn’t ready for the volume and legal costs anyway
Loads of reddit refugees on tumblr, squabbles and Tildes too. Tumblr is fucking crawling with them/us at the moment.
That assumes people’s usage is all-or-nothing, though. I started using Lemmy and I now use reddit a lot less, but still use it for communities that don’t exist or aren’t active here. I don’t imagine I’m the only one in that boat.
50k very active users that try to have integrity is a pretty big deal. Because with that will come development of the platform, meanwhile Reddit is going to struggle with a new chapter of shitty moderation and decreased quality. There are also a lot of people burnt out on the issue and so I expect real numbers from the immediate to be more visible over the next month or two.
Plus, which instances are you looking at for those numbers? Are all the lemmy instances and kbin included in those numbers?
Let’s just assume that it’s going to be about 1% of reddit’s userbase. Does it matter which 1%? How will the platforms evolve? Because both are very different now than before, we’re seeing realtime changes across a lot of tech and the internet. A lot of faith was lost by the public in many platforms by the people at all paying attention, and a lot of hope was garnished by the successful move to new platforms.
Stuff is definitely changing. I’m curious what big tech is gonna do to try to restore faith, or if they’ll try to pretend nothing’s happened and try to sweep it under the rug. A lot of people already try to downplay the events into just numbers, but in reality, there are a LOT of eyes watching and waiting to see what happens. People are tired of the same old capitalist bullshit and want something better, it isn’t just ex/reddittors, it’s Twitter users, Linux users, Amazon users, Netflix users, students with debt, homeowners, and a LOT of young people. People want better and the messed up economic future is making people pay attention more than ever.
It’s all interwoven and something’s gotta give.
Does it matter which 1%?
It very much does. The old metric was that 1% create, 10% comment, and the rest consume (I don’t think the metric included a number for moderator-types). I suspect most of the emigres have a heavier percentage of moderators, creators, and commenters. And I suspect it also contains a larger percentage of old-time redditors. While there are undoubtedly a bunch of people stepping into place on reddit right now, the loss of the people who left is going to hurt reddit.
I don’t like the distinction between commenting and creation tbh. Comments were most of reddit’s valuable content. 90% of everything else in the past few years has just been rehosting content from tiktok and Instagram
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.
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.
This is false. RIF clearly gets rate limited. Occasionally it will actually load the front page but every other time it throws 429 errors
Infinity is not. Also, this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/14nbw6g/updated_rate_limits_going_into_effect_over_the/
The api changes will occur in the following weeks.
Also, apparently RIF works when not logged in from what ive read. Its actually an oauth thing.
For RIF, the first day I was getting the 429 error. Then it was showing old.r.com. After a couple days, rif loaded like it normally would pre shutdown. I was just logged out and Im not logging back in. I havnt noticed any issues. NSFW items still load.
🙋♂️
There are dozens of us!
This is the only response we need
We are like in the… many.
