Hopefully I’m posting this in the right place, but I see Reddit developments as Tech news right now.
Wanted to share a website that is tracking Subreddits that have/will be going dark. It even has a sound notification for when they change their status.
Edit: Adding the stream https://www.twitch.tv/reddark_247
Double Edit: Data visualization https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/
Damn. That is only a tiny little dip in the post/comment rate so far relative to the historical cycle. What, maybe 5%, assuming the vertical axis crosses at zero? Not terribly encouraging…
I’ve continued to tell people: This won’t kill Reddit in the sense of outright turning it into a ghost town. If your only goal is to make Reddit collapse overnight, you’re going to be disappointed. The quality content that many people here enjoy is not what makes up the frontpage of r/all or what a huge amount of passive users consume. Reddit has more than enough low quality trash to backfill the frontpage and keep users occupied.
Anybody migrating should focus on porting quality content. Let reddit live long and be a dumping ground.
It’s more about reaching a tipping point where adding a new user to something else (fingers crossed for Fediverse) makes it a palatable alternative for more than one redditor. The network effect is a thing, so it exists, and if enough people get kicked off of an app they like it’s not impossible to hit.
My partner is a casual reddit user; the experience change was immediately apparent. She got bored and switched to facebook because all of the niche communities that the larger subreddits repost from went silent.
Yeah, I was negatively surprised as well. Almost 60% of all big SFW subreddits closed, and still only a small percentage less posts and comments.
Reddit may also be astroturfing their own site to make it look like there’s not much effect of the blackout.
The large subs and front page just consist of bots reposting the same old content. The bots are easy to tell apart from real people just by eye, so I’m sure that reddit either has no problem with that or that they made these bots themselves to hide the fact that actual users are becoming less and less.
