Just in case anyone here was wondering how Reddit’s numbers are looking these days…
Data and visuals from https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit
Did the actual comments fall or did the tool get hit by the API change?
That depends on how it’s written. The fact that it’s not showing zero completely makes me think they’d been iterating over threads counting comments, and they’re hitting API limits. But that’s just a blind guess without having looked at their source code.
If they’re only able to get the comment counts for a smaller number of threads, those individual numbers would be noisy but lower.
For example, before they got 100 threads with counts ranging from 0-100. Now they only get 10 threads with the same range of counts.
Funny enough, if it is an API problem, then this is one of the scenarios that a scrapper could easily solve the issue and grant accurate results again. A playwright script written by ChatGTP could do it.
I read reddit with a client that uses a scrapper now. The fuck is reddit gonna do, block Chromium? They said they wanted to stop this, well, congrats, they started it instead.
ReVanced can patch most of the popular apps with your own private (free to use) API key.
Step by step guide if you’re interested
I’m sure Reddit is seeing private key usage sky rocketing on their end since ReVanced released these patches. Whether or not Reddit chooses to do anything about it remains to be seen, but I can’t help but wonder how long it will last.
Nowadays I still stick with Lemmy for general scrolling and only go to Reddit for my niche subreddits that don’t have active equivalents here.
Yes, a big factor, many users gradually left the site after the API changed. Also the sub mods have become increasingly ban-happy in the recent years.
Subredditstats logs about 1/4 of the comments posted on a given subreddit. Pick any small subreddit and check its comments to verify for yourself. Takes about a minute. 25 comments/page. Old.reddit.com/r/____/comments
I find it very interesting that this is reportedly one of the top subs on all of Reddit: “Comments Per Day” ranks it #1, by Subscribers or Posts Per Day it is #2, Growth (Day) and Growth (Month) are both #5, Growth (Month) and Growth (Year) are both #4, etc.
Not only that, it is by far the top sub by this “Comments Per Day” metric: it shows 15828 Comments reported in a recent 24-hr period of time, whereas the next highest sub is r/worldnews with a mere 5153 Comments Per Day, then r/AmItheAsshole and r/nfl also ~5k, then others rapidly falling further like r/NoStupidQuestions and r/AITAH each ~3k, etc.
To reiterate: this is the #1 sub over all of Reddit, with >3x more comments per day than any other sub, and like more comments than the next 3 subs all combined… and it still has fallen off a cliff, even by this same exact metric.
I do not know how reliable subredditstats.com is overall, but even if it were not so good lately, so long as all the stats are more or less evenly biased across all the subs, we should still be able to learn something from these comparisons? (please add a correction if you know of some evidence that this is not true) One caveat is that it might be harder to compare now vs. pre-API changes? But if it can be believed, the numbers fell from a peak of >100k in June 2023, to a more average ~75k, then dropped like a rock in July to ~15k and has remained hovering around that area ever since…
I do not visit popular subs on Reddit anymore, just one that has refused to migrate to Lemmy/Kbin, but this sounds entirely believable to me. If you click the links to the top posts, the very title titles of the posts and top comments to them also showcase the change: like the #2 top post to that sub is “Now that Reddit are killing 3rd party apps on July 1st what are great alternatives to Reddit?” w/ 78.1k upvotes, and has the top comment w/ 5.2k upvotes of “I might get back into reading books after over a decade.” (and other comments likewise, pointing to Reddit alternatives, and angry exclamations about the 3rd party apps going away)
In short, THIS seems to be the evidence that we have been waiting for all this time, about just how far Reddit has fallen / died off?
Although comments on Lemmy/Kbin I do not think have risen by +~50k or so per day, so I wonder where all that Reddit traffic went? Possibly as the aforementioned comment said, it went offline, basically nowhere.
Edit: I nominated this post to m/BestOf.
Possibly as the aforementioned comment said, it went offline, basically nowhere.
Probably depends on the audience. Discord for some, a bit of Lemmy, people maybe went back to old school forums too.
Yes exactly, much of the people who left leddit have scattered across a multitude of social media / content aggregators.
tiktok/insta/lemmy/kbin/bluesky/etc. there are so many, it blows my mind when people say “why then has lemmy not exploded?” without recognizing there are many many lemmy instances and many many MORE alternatives. It’s not just a reddit or lemmy decision lol
And even with Lemmy being the vast majority of my replacement, I’m commenting less. The amount and depth of quality here isn’t the same, and that prompts less discussion.
If you read the subreddit stats website, you’ll see a massive disclaimer at the top that the data is inaccurate after the API change because the site owner didn’t want to pay the new rates. I think a lot of people here are overstating how much reddit has changed since the API shutoff.
Believe it or not, that GIGANTIC, absolutely un-missable disclaimer was not there yesterday… or at least it did not show for me for whatever reason, definitely on mobile Firefox and I thought I had also looked on desktop but now could not swear to it. I cannot offer definitive proof but here’s a snapshot from Sept. 28 - not quite yesterday but long after July 1 https://web.archive.org/web/20230928153646/https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit but still is missing that disclaimer. In any case, thank you for the note of caution: possibly results might be comparable across subs but perhaps not pre- vs. post-API changes.
Not that I don’t appreciate the cynicism, but by killing the api, could be a major dropoff in bot accounts.
this is not an opinion that should be shared by anyone who has opened a frontpage comment section in the last 3 months. bot spam has only gotten significantly worse since july.
the API changes had no effect on bot accounts, anyway. reddit corp specifically made an exception for them and other “low volume” API users - which is why you can still use your own API key to activate defunct 3rd party apps.
(yes, the implication is that normal users can go to hell if they don’t want to use the app - but by imitating a bot, reddit gives you preferential treatment. they want bots juicing their activity metrics.)
my guess is that subredditstats.com is itself impacted by the API changes, or this is a consequence of frontpage posts cycling MUCH more slowly than they did before the protests. fewer individual posts reaching r/all means less traffic and fewer comments as a result.
they want bots juicing their activity metrics
Seems like it would have been easier to just not destroy third party apps given that their traffic numbers have apparently collapsed because of that.
yes it’s always easier to NOT fuck up a fully functional product and drive your userbase off a cliff, but that’s not good enough for the huge IPO that huffman is courting. he wants to be able to say “look, we’re monetizing 80% more MAUs than before and earning 45% more per person”.
frankly i doubt they’ll be able to go public at all at this rate. if i were the Newhouses (reddit’s owners through Advance Publications) i would certainly be looking for someone to unload this hot potato onto.
Has it gotten worse, or has it stayed the same while real people left?
I don’t ask to be a jerk. I’m genuinely curious. I don’t roll over that way often anymore and when I do it’s always for super specific things so I don’t hit the front page.
it can’t really be evaluated in a vacuum. the front page moves so much more slowly that maybe it’s the same number of bots concentrated on a smaller number of posts, i dunno. i just know that it’s inescapable on popular posts and the bots have hardly needed to adapt because reddit corp doesn’t give a fuck.
The satisfaction of seeing this is hard to describe. Internet 1 : 0 Reddit
I do visit Reddit on occasion (with Adblock) but I haven’t made one comment or one post since I lost Apollo. Why? I deleted all history then deleted the accounts. I can’t even upvote and that’s my little protest still in full swing.
Same. It’s unavoidable to use it when it turns up in Google searches or for niche content, but I’ve 100% stopped contributing.
The corporate world undervalues goodwill, both from their customers and their employees.
