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’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.
Reddit became a significant time sink for me. I’d already backed away from FB and IG. Kbin seems a better fit for me, and it’s a customizable fit. Yay!
@Lowbird me as well! a good thing!
@Arotrios @atlasraven31
Lemmy just seems better overall. Only feature missing is a multireddit equivalent. Once that happens it’s all hookers and blow far as the eyes can see.
@SinningStromgald
What do you mean by that? We can create our own groups or communities (or also known as magazines). Isn’t this “multireddit”? Otherwise, what do you mean by that term?
They allow users to make their own shortcuts to a custom selection of subreddits and view them sort of as if they were a single subreddit.
https://guides.co/g/a-beginners-guide-to-reddit/9662
@cutitdown Oh that feature. Yes, I used it too and it was a really good and useful function.
I’ve left reddit when the protests started and have been on Lemmy since.
Lemmy just doesn’t have the content. Or if it does, it’s harder to find. There’s fewer posts and fewer comments. A lot of the niche communities I enjoyed on Reddit technically exist on Lemmy but are completely dead: hopeful attempts by other former redditors to try to replicate what they left.
You might dig Kbin. It bridges the gap between Mastodon and Lemmy, and allows you to follow users, which opens up a wealth of new content, as what they post appears on your feeds. It’s new, so there are bugs with some of the more advanced features, but the dev is very cool and it’s had a better uptime than lemmy.world. Here’s some instances that run it:
kbin.social - main instance, run by the dev @ernest
fedia.io
feddit.online
kbin.cafe
kglitch.social
Links to others
If you do choose to use Kbin, you’ll want to follow and subscribe to communities and people actively. I’ve got about 100 communities and 300+ people I follow, and my feed is better than Reddit’s ever was.
I’m still in the process of adding communities and people. Thanks for the tip!
@paultimate14 this has been my experience as well…a huge number of hollow magazines, whose titles reflect the Reddit DNA, but are sadly empty. _I’ve been on kbin, lemmy and Masto since abandoning Reddit, and I wish them all the growth at the expense of the rotten old platforms that they can muster!
@Arotrios @atlasraven31
@scabrous@kbin.social
I hear you on the empty communities - a lot of the more interesting content comes from the Mastodon side of the Fediverse (one of the reasons I’m on Kbin instead of Lemmy is so that I’ve got access to it via following users). It really takes a dedicated mod to make a community run in this space, as it’s difficult to build an audience on smaller platforms, and harder still to build a community that actively comments and posts. I’m not surprised that there’s a lot of available virtual property floating about in the wake of the Redditoxdus.
However, if you’re a content poster, one thing I have noticed is that a lot of these empty communities have a lot of subscribers, and it can be an excellent place to post or cross-post your content - helps revitalize the community, and often can be surprisingly successful if you hit the right tone for where you’re posting.