Was there even a mass exodus? I largely avoid Reddit now, but I do kind of doubt that they’ve been hurt in any meaningful way by all the protests and people leaving…

  • Shambling Shapes
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    5711 months ago

    Their user numbers are available with a web search. Reddit useage dipped towards end of June but has mostly leveled out.

    Quite a few mods left, which has had a larger impact than an equal number of general users leaving would. The niche topic sub I was involved in went from four mods to one half-hearted mod. The quality of posts has dropped. Almost every comment thread contains complaints. Reports are piled up.

    Most surprising to me when I peeked at the sub this weekend was the amount of borderline-incel desperation and negativity. The sub is for a hobby that while slightly male majority, we had plenty of women contributing with minimal problems. Not anymore. If I were a woman looking at that sub for the first time, I would probably block it. It is so depressing and angry now, I barely recognize it.

    • @[email protected]
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      3711 months ago

      I have to wonder how much of Reddit’s traffic is bots and lurkers though.

      Post quality is a bigger indicator, and that does seem to be dropping. This is why Reddit banning 3rd party apps was such a big deal. It doesn’t matter if 99% of your users use the official app if 99% of the content posted to the side is posted by the 1% that don’t.

      As someone who was around for the digg migration, it didn’t drop off overnight (hell digg.com is still around), but they gradually bled content until everyone was on Reddit. Lemmy right now is very reminiscent of early Reddit.

      • @[email protected]
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        1211 months ago

        Post quality is a bigger indicator, and that does seem to be dropping

        That’s the thing - it’s hard to track this. If anything it’ll be a slow decline

        • @[email protected]
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          511 months ago

          It’s hard to track this

          Not at all. I can already see a decline in the number of Reddit TTS videos I see on my feed and when I do, they’re mostly years old

          • Shambling Shapes
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            211 months ago

            Easy to see anecdotally, hard to define quantitatively. Reddit is never going to publicize that sort of thing as a metric: “ratio of bot activity to subscribed member activity” would be great but we’ll never see those numbers.

            • @[email protected]
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              211 months ago

              Text to speech. There are Tiktok accounts that just scrape popular text posts from Reddit and read them out through text to speech over a video of something like Minecraft parkour or Subway Surfers.

      • @[email protected]
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        311 months ago

        Agreed and not just content creators but active users in general. I bet someone like me who now on average posts 10 messages a day to Lemmy was more valuable to reddit than 10 lurkers.

    • @[email protected]
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      311 months ago

      Has the community moved elsewhere, be it Lemmy/Kbin or Discord?

      It’s disheartening to see this kind of communities collapse