Reddit protest by its community moderators has impacted user engagements, traffic and visits to its ad portal since its beginning on June 12.
It probably won’t, Summer Reddit has been a known phenomenon for years. It’s going to be flooded with even more children than usual.
A flood of children at the same time as an exodus of the type of users who actually upload good content to Reddit could definitely set up the conditions for a steady bleed of users away from the site, though. Especially with moderators’ ability to actually do their job being impacted by the API changes.
Also worth noting that reddit control the metrics that they release for a lot of this.
There’s no real measure of good engagement vs shallow engagement, so they can find a way to show that user visits are up even if the worthwhile content is starting its slow slide. Shit, i probably used to visit reddit once a day for 12 hours, but now i visit 5 times a day when i instinctively enter the URL.
So the metrics that reddit controls are showing that things are going down. How bad must things be that even reddit can’t hide it from their metrics now?
If we could truly measure good vs shallow engagement, I wonder how much worse these numbers would be.
It will probably drive away a lot of adults, though. Even if they are unaware of the Fediverse or don’t consider it an acceptable substitute for Reddit, they won’t stay if the threads are dominated by bored teens screwing around.
It’s already bad enough. On my single visit back a few days ago it struck me that the largely ignorant and unperceptive comments I was reading were probably written by kids who were just killing time and didn’t actually have much interest in the topic at hand.