"plunges" by a whole 10%, and primarily only during the initial 2 days. Has since mostly rebounded. That is disappointing.
Will see what happens July 1st of course when apps finally stop working.
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
185 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37735 readers
55 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Yeah, July 1st will be interesting. The important thing is that the various alternatives have gotten seeded with users who are contributing enough content to make them viable. That means that when the 1st hits users will have viable places to go.
Honestly, when I first got to Beehaw a couple weeks ago it was pretty sparse and 10 comments in a thread was a lot. Now 10 comments is thin and the low hundreds are becoming the norm. It's growing and snowballing.
The only reason I haven't left left is because Apollo still works. That will cease in the next day and I will be done unless Google directs me to there for something I need.
Same for me. As long as opening Relay brings me to reddit, it's hard to stop using it. But once that stops, or becomes ad ridden or whatever, there's no way in hell I will install the official reddit app or anything like that, and I hate using a browser on mobile so not doing that either... So yeah. That'll be it for me. So far Beehaw/lemmy is shaping up to replace it though.
Oh without a doubt.
I do miss some of the silly quirky fun subs (r/HyruleEngineering I'm looking at you), but my normal usage needs have been met by a blend of Lemmy and Kbin (if Lemmy is having a rough day, I subscribed to the same communities on Kbin and can access from that side, or vice-versa).
Yeah that sub and a fair amount of other fairly niche ones have been sorely missed. I'm doubtful there will ever be a real replacement that gets the same level of engagement.
Smaller subs like zentangle, game and show specifics, as well as body and philosophy subs, specifically about aphantasia. A lot of just generally creative spaces. I've been able to mostly find suitable replacements for larger niche things like the Steam Controller and things within the last decade, but I was subbed to a lot of old things and lot of niche ones, small enough that it could potentially be transferred here but also small enough that it was already a desert, and many users did not understand Reddit since many were new to it. Navigating multiple accounts and instances and logins is not something I imagine them being good at.
Not to mention the existing content for those places, which has been my biggest loss because Google directs everything to reddit threads now. I made sure to set on libre reddit to give as little engagement as possible.
It's pretty devastating, not the loss of Reddit but the loss of the resource. Jeroba satisfies my Boost for Reddit scrolling fix, but I've been missing the engaging informational content. I miss doing the research and being the commenter, I often was especially in the vaporents community and other things I'm confident in. I still do it here when I can of course, but again it's been more about the subject matters and amount of content/users. Nothing to do with what's going on here, we just need more time and some of us are rightfully grieving the loss of an old friend who got hooked on greeds green corphetamine.
In time it will be better! :) Both the feeling of loss and the growth of the communities here. I'm hopeful that in the not too far future we will have niche communities that existed elsewhere, just far too many right now for me are either empty (byproduct of multiple instances I believe) or actually created and just not yet being used.
Have you checked out lemmy.beyondcombustion.net?
Ah nice! I remember when beyond combustion was being created, I haven't checked it out since I left reddit. Good shout :)
I think this is just the leading edge unless folks are lining up to replace moderators in most communities.
Systems tend to fail slowly, and then all at once.
Most fediverse denizens have noticed how sane and measured the dialogue is, which is entirely a product of the audience who is here right now. But everyone's got a threshold, whether Reddit loses everyone or not isn't relevant if they couldn't be profitable with all of us. There's a death spiral coming, and if there's anything left Reddit will have to functionally change.
Easiest to think of Reddit as a party grinding on too long and starting to get rowdier, and the bouncers just quit.
but 10% is 60+% of actual human engagement. The rest are just bots talking to themselves and clicking ad links.
Will the bots dissapear when the API becomes inaccessible?
The free bots that were helpful (like remindmebot) will probably all die, whereas advertisers will pay for artificial chatgpt users to boost their own content.
Most likely. API access is actually the preferential way of handling things because the alternative (scraping) requires more server resources.
If a company offers a free tier of their API (even if it’s insufficient) it is unlikely they’re friendly to scrapers.
Recently Reddit opened up devvit as a way for redditors to build approved internal bots but it didn't seem like they intended to staff a team to build replacements any time soon
And the front page is filled with trash from fringe subs.
I know that is a fun narrative, but I haven't seen data to back that up unfortunately, it's all been anecdotal evidence.
The companies who heavily track these metrics so they can recommend to their customers what platform to advertise on all seem to indicate that there is still plenty of regular human engagement happening.
The NSFW content seems to be the only part of the protest that has them recommending pausing ad spending.
Also worth noting is that traffic is not made equal. Often 10% of users generate almost all of the content that other users consume.
Reddit has driven away many of its content creators and moderators.
I think reddit will linger for a very long time even as the quality goes down the toilet. There are millions of casuals on there just doomscrolling that don't seem to mind the ads and the horrible official app/new website. It's still interesting to follow the story as it unfolds, but I'm also slowly losing that interest as I continue to explore lemmy. We'll all mostly forget about it at some point, and that will be a good day for us, regardless of what happens to reddit and it's disengaged remnants of a user base.
Of course it will, Digg is still around and so is Myspace. These sites rarely "die" in the sense of shutting down but just become a husk of its former self.
Those of us who've been on the internet since the mid-90s remember how Digg fucked up. Apparently none of those people who remember what happened last time are around at the top of Reddit anymore.
Yeah, it's almost verbatim the exact thing Digg did. So stupid.
History repeats, they say.
Meanwhile, Threadiverse is on the verge of reaching 100k active monthly accounts.
Of course, the numbers are incomparable. But this whole thing made Threadiverse into a viable space for a lot of people. Reddit app developers are starting to develop apps for Lemmy/Kbin. Dozens of new instances got set up. The whole space is bigger, more resilient, and leaps and bounds more vibrant than it was in May and before (I've been here for years).
A lot of people will come back to Reddit. But a lot of people will also remain here. And this space will be there the next time Reddit craps the bed, better prepared to take the influx.
Lemmy dev has also gotten like 500% more donation pledges per month. He’s up to $1300/mo now i think. Fediverse projects can certainly use cash.
A lot of people will come back to Reddit. But a lot of people will also remain here. And this space will be there the next time Reddit craps the bed, better prepared to take the influx.
And we'll be ready for it!
Speaking of app developers, has anyone heard anything about a Beehaw app? I haven't seen it brought up yet
My understanding is that Beehaw is just an instance that can be logged into? I'm logged into my Beehaw account on Jeroba for Lemmy right now which was the only account I was able to figure how to login to, as I have a kbin as well.
If you're talking specifically about something for Beehaw, I'm not sure, but it seems what I'm using is in line with Beehaw's rules - downvoting disabled is applied.
There's a small server maintainence popup but it hasn't noticeabley affected anything, and it seems it's being worked on.
Sorry if this wasn't what you were looking for!
You can just log in to beehaw with any Lemmy app
Oh thanks, I never looked at Lemmy before had no idea lol
As others have said, you can log in using any general Lemmy app. However, you can also use specifically Beehaw (or any Lemmy instance like sh.it or world) as a Progressive Web App (PWA).
If you're on iOS, go to the site on Safari (other browsers don't work) and in the browser options select "Add to Home Screen". The page from Safari will appear on your home screen like any other app. Not sure how it works on Android but I imagine the process is similar and involves using Chrome.
Navigating it is easy enough, tap posts to load them and swipe left-to-right to go back one "layer". You do need to make a PWA for every Lemmy instance you use, however. If you use a standard app, you can use the one app for all your instances. I haven't found a good app on iOS yet, so PWA it is for me!
This is also how I got over the urge to go on Reddit. I simply replaced Apollo with Beehaw's PWA so if I feel the Reddit urge, I end up on Beehaw instead.
The small drop in users isn't super surprising. I'm more interested in the drop of mods and tools. If more garbage slips through on the regular than I can imagine users start to drop off from their favorite subs turning to shit. Either way I'm done with reddit
Hm. I looked around while I was blanking my posts and comments and I feel there's a lot more "activity" in some subreddits, but it feels bot driven. Many of the accounts I looked at were relatively new, like less than a year old. Maybe they were real users, but it certainly didn't feel like it to me.
Anyone else taken a peek?
I feel the same way. A ton of the top front page posts are just repeated slightly changed comments by less than a year old accounts with almost no posts or karma. It's a very weird vibe over there right now and I'm pretty sure even though activity is up... human activity is dramatically down except for smaller subs (which seem to have unique content with not a lot of bot activity).
I think a large part of it honestly is just new users not understanding that they get to pick their usernames. By default now when you create a reddit account, it gives you a username (with editable text box) and gives you a space to input your email.
What they don't tell you is that you don't have to fill out the email line and that you can edit your suggested username. Well, at least this was the case a year or maybe two ago, that was the last time I created an alt on Reddit.
But as a result of Reddit getting more popular and widely known, more people unfamiliar with it are making accounts not knowing they can be using, not Revered_Longitude2893 or Ad_Internement759. It's not necessary bots, it's just Reddits shitty auto-naming that gives it's users basically the same names.
Seriously, the number of Relevant_{word}{numbers} on Reddit within the last year is astounding. I've noticed it too.
But many of them are actually people if you engage with them. Sometimes it's questions in PM, because they're used to apps where you DM people instead of publicly sharing information.
That's not to say that all of them are human, for sure some are bots. Those often seemed to get called out for just copying other comments as well. And it's definitely not a good look to make your new users look like bots.
Overall terrible decisions leading to what happened this month. It's been on this track for a while, it sucks.
hopefully there will be even bigger drop in usage on july 1st
I'm a little surprised the drop in activity was that low. What the fuck were people browsing when most of Reddit was blacked out?
yeah looks like only 3.6 mil people stopped using the site (out of 52 mil) but I have no clue what was even left during the blackout. Did people just not notice?
There are a lot of people who are/were totally ok with Reddit after the blackout starting, only commenting that people are fucking stupid, and they need to shut up about it already. I know a couple people like this.
Honestly, Meta, TikTok, twitter, etc have already shown us people honestly don’t give a shit, as long as they get their serotonin/dopamine fix.
Personally, I haven’t intentionally been back since the 11th, and the only times I’ve accidentally gone there, it was for the 3 seconds it took me to close it down. And I don’t intend to go back.
Honestly it could be just as simple as reddit spooling up the bots so the drop in users only looks low, when in fact the number of real people using the site plunged considerably.
Stopped using it is one thing, using it less another. 3.6m out of 52 is what? 8% of the entire user base suddenly stopped, including a lot of important mods, which are hard to replace in that quality? And the rest of the user base I can imagine have less activity in Reddit, meaning less content creation, replies and therefore less advertisement seen. And some people may just trolling more than before, trying to destroy Reddit, some use Bots.
The overall quality is less than before, not better I assume. And a little bit less user than before. The site has a bad image now, so I can imagine some are waiting until alternatives are build and grow on Lemmy or Kbin in example and will switch later. So hard numbers of how many people stopped using the site is not telling the entire story. One has to open the book and read the lines, not just judge the cover story.
I think a lot of people scoffing at the numbers don't realize that 8% is not insignificant for a site as robust and long lived as Reddit. That's a pretty huge change in a short period of time. It will be interesting to see what happens when the third party apps shut down.
At least a considerable amount of spanish speaking subs i used to browse where not even aware of the blackout
I forget this how reddit is big in other languages. I'm Norwegian, and in most of the Scandinavian countries reddit is kind of niche. English is my only other language, but I'm sure French, German, and a bunch of asian languages are big too.
Also I guess there are a lot of non-technical people on reddit that use the platform like they use facebook or insta. These people might not care about the changes. Around reddit I see people referring to it as an "app". Reddit was so much better I feel when most users were on a desktop.
Reddit Is Already on the Rebound
Interesting article from Wired, with some decent sources.
Did Reddit pay for that article? No mention whatsoever of Spez forcing subs open and ejecting mods. Just back to "business as usual".
Both Wired and Reddit are owned by Condé Nast. (Technically sister corps in Advance Publications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications)
Article doesn't seem to acknowledge the API rates are bonkers.
Interesting that ads have dropped even as the traffic bounced back.
Also, it will be interesting to see what happens July 1.
I’ll be interested to see how much the usage drops after third-party apps go offline in the next few days.
I thought it was already recovering...
Huh - interesting. Sounds like the basic impact was less than 10%, but maybe some higher effect around some of the money making services. But over all, it this sounds like a blip.
view more: next ›