1y ago

Reddit protest plunges user engagement, site activity and ad portal visits

techcrunch.com Reddit protest plunges user engagement, site activity and ad portal visits

Reddit protest by its community moderators has impacted user engagements, traffic and visits to its ad portal since its beginning on June 12.

34 comments

Let's see if it continues through July and August.
I'm hopeful, but there is still a lot of content engagement over on Reddit. It doesn't seem like it's struggling all that much from a surface level observation.
- This is (maybe) the "beginning" of the end for Reddit, not the "end" of the end. The big change isn't Reddit, but here.
  When Digg fell, everyone moved to Reddit. When this API situation started there was not an obvious new solution to move to. Lemmy/KBin were mentioned but not readily accepted due to concerns with the content and capabilities of the fediverse. That is changing quickly, and the next time Reddit screws up, we will have much more active communities, quality apps, and fewer bugs.
- Giant websites like Reddit don’t die overnight, death by a thousand cuts is how it happens.
  No one expects Reddit to shutter in the span of a month or two, but as more and more people get fed up and move, the rest will follow.
  Everyone who acts like Reddit can’t crumble when social media changes all the time are silly. Reddit won’t be around forever
- 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.
  
  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.
- Which subs in particular?
  The largest ones like r/pics are still protesting iirc (protest engagement seeming to bring in less ad revenue than normal traffic) and some large ones like r/Minecraft have shutdown. (Someone else made a good point about the biggest subs not having particular tribes and thus the mods are theoretically easier to replace than a smaller knit community - but the ones currently in charge are still trying.)
  Engaging over protest content seems to still be hurting reddit where it counts. Some subs have gone completely to normal (and this is what reddit is trying to promote on r/all) but it seems not enough.

@abff08f4813c The main thing about all this is that there were no alternatives to Reddit until now. We needed a good push and reason to leave but never had a tangible alternative with nothing even showing up in Search results worth checking out. Now we do, All these big corps are screwing themselves, and we now have a BETTER alternative than all of them. So keep screwing up, Reddit, we have a place to go now. Keep screwing up, Twitter, Google, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Imgur, and all others that will soon follow suit.
- What has Stackoverflow done? Im ootl on that one
  
  They are seeing a decrease in usage since ChatGpt came about. They had implemented a network wide no AI generated answer policy, but after seeing their number declined decided to blame the mods for removing and banning users who were posting AI answers.
  They refuse to show any data that supports their claims (that the mods banning users accounts for the decrease in usage), have told mods in private that they can no longer enforce the rule, but still want the rule to be in place.
  They have continuously said one thing and done another, slowing eroding moderator and user trust. You can checkout the meta stack overflow site for the entire situation.

Honestly, while I'm happily settled here in the "threadiverse" and all that, I've seen that the main subs I used to visit and have now reopened, are all working about the same as before the protests. They were all basically niches, so they weren't as badly affected by bot comments and the such. We will see, however, if their moderation can still keep up after the 1st tho.
- . We will see, however, if their moderation can still keep up after the 1st tho.
  That's exactly it, I think. Outlook: Doubtful
- I feel like I'm seeing way less posts moving through Hot. I'll have articles from 13+ hours among my feed, where that used to not happen. A 6-7 hour gap would fully refresh the feed just about, whereas now if might be closer to 2/3s new.
  Won't have much to compare to now, account wipe starts tonight.
  
  Thank you for your service!

This is a really weird article with sentences in it that don't make sense.
"the amount of time people spent on the Reddit website by close to 16% between June 12 and 13" - what does that mean?
"Web traffic of the platform also declined to about 52 million" - 52 million
<what>
?
With ChatGPT getting popular, I'm starting to wonder what I'm reading.
- "the amount of time people spent on the Reddit website by close to 16% between June 12 and 13" - what does that mean?
  In the article, the full sentence is,
  That "blackout" movement, which briefly caused Reddit to go down, dropped daily traffic by about 7% and the amount of time people spent on the Reddit website by close to 16% between June 12 and 13, according to the data shared by web traffic analysis firm Similarweb.
  So basically the amount of time people spent on reddit dropped 16% between June 12 and June 13.
  "Web traffic of the platform also declined to about 52 million" - 52 million ?
  Yeah that could be worded better. No units. Resumably it's about the number of visits.
  Again, the full sentence is,
  Web traffic of the platform also declined to about 52 million on June 13, compared with averaging nearly 56 million in the days prior.
  So a 4 million drop in number of visits.
  
  Yeah that could be worded better. No units. Resumably it's about the number of visits.
  Looks like that number lines up with their reported DAU (daily active users) metric rather than site visits.
  52 million DAU is about where Reddit was in the summer of 2021, per data on Statista. It also tends to vary up or down by a few million at each sample point, so we'd really have to see a long-term trend-line rather than a 2-week data snapshot to know whether the blackout had any real effect.
- I trust this was written by hand, because ChatGPT wouldn't make grammar errors.
  Unless someone mindlessly copied the parts of the article and stitched them together...
- it says in the article that the average time people spent on the site went down from 8.4min to 7.16min (assuming decimal min) that is a drop of 16%
  web traffic declined from 56m to 52m a drop of 4m or 7%.

That “blackout” movement, which briefly caused Reddit to go down, dropped daily traffic by about 7%
I wouldn't call single digit percentages a plunge.
But who knows, maybe they will continue to bleed users and the protest was just the first crack in dam wall:
Experts are unsure if the current protest will significantly impact Reddit or if it will just be another controversial moment in the platform’s history.
- I've said this before and I'll say it again, I don't think the largest wave of users leaving has hit yet. Once the big apps shut down today, I think there is going to be another wave that actually leaves, and then it's just going to trickle out for months probably as reddit gets less relevant since the people actually making the content are likely to be the ones to move.

I was spending easily 2-4 hours a day scrolling through my feed on Reddit, it impacted me in so many ways that I didn’t see at the time.
Now? I’m enjoying a quick pop in on Lemmy and find myself enjoying my time away from the scrolling for content. I’m enjoying moderating a community and the definite lack of trolls at the moment.
Here’s to hoping this atmosphere continues for the foreseeable future!

34 comments