2y ago

As Reddit Crushes Protests, Its User Traffic Returns to Normal

www.pcmag.com As Reddit Crushes Protests, Its User Traffic Returns to Normal

User visits and time spent on the social media platform normalize after traffic to Reddit briefly dipped last week during the blackout, according to SimilarWeb.

Edit: but also see https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/88139/Reddit-traffic-returning-normal-sort-of which explains that ad visits are still waaay down - and continue going downhill.

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Oh, look another article on how Reddit is fine. Must be fine, everyone stop protesting, it doesn't work. /s
Reddit is unprofitable with massive new expenses, no realistic plan on making a profit, apparently trying to pump for an upcoming IPO, being run by a CEO who seems fine to disrespect its lifeblood, the community, and thinks it's a good idea to emulate Elmo... what could go wrong?
Like these sorts of things with large momentum, they don't stop overnight but who can say the Reddit ship is on a good trajectory?
- And don't forget that the current API shit won't really hit the consequences fan for another week.

That said, I really like this insightful take:
https://kbin.social/m/reddit/p/528198/https-www-pcmag-com-news-as-reddit-crushes-protests-its-user-traffic-returns-to-normal-lol-we-re-all-great-and-powerful-piggies-aren-t-we#post-comment-934433
TL;DR - the protests worked, also expect to see a different headline once we reach June 30.
- There's also the longer term effect that could be in play of the content pool drying up and driving users away, those changes are reverberations and wouldn't be having a dramatic immediate effect.
  Right now if anything I'd expect views to be spiking due to the content generated from the drama itself. Once that dies out then damages to content generation from driving away users will be more evident.
- Not to mention, this is user stats, not mod stats. Reddit with no moderation would have a pretty quick expiry date. Normal users no longer doomscrolling once they hear about an abstract software principle was never the plan (or at least I hope it wasn't).
- Yeah, I admit I'm still going to check my news multireddit every day, but I'm literally just reading the links, not the comments. And once Relay stops working that will stop happening.
  Hopefully by the next time spez or his cohorts do something stupid, all of the dev talent this shit show has attracted to the fediverse will have made migration more intuitive.

Well. With the CEO blatantly lying and just showing how little integrity he has whats stopping him from just hiring a bunch of cheap workers/bots. Or even just blatantly changing the numbers in the database? He can change the upvotes for any post with just a simple database update.

I'd wait for the API changes before talking: I always got the feeling that most of the traffic is bots in those obscure only Numbers subs used to coordinate botnets and send ciphered messages

I'm going back to delete comments lol. I wonder how much is people doing that.
Anyway, this is just starting. Pissing on mods who do unpaid work isn't going to work. The next batch will wonder why they are doing it when we hear about how the CEO got rich on IPO on their backs.

Opening RIF is, unfortunately, a muscle memory for me. For these next 7 days when it's still open, I'll probably be on there on occasion, although the subs I'm subscribed to anymore are either closed, or they're ModCoord & SaveThirdPartyApp. I've unfollowed subs that re-opened, and frankly, I was never subscribed to much beyond specific communities I liked to begin with. The "statistically insignificant" millions of users on Apollo, RIF, etc. (last I counted RIF had 5 million downloads on the app store to Reddit's 100 million -- that 5 percent so talked about is not a small number.) My post histories are deleted, all my accounts but one are deleted, I'm now just there to see the end, and see the drama with my own eyes (and part of that, for me, is that I don't wholly trust what I don't see myself, either.)
That the daily traffic is at "normal" levels, to me, is interesting, because we're not in a "normal" news cycle right now. With Trump indictments, the sub implosion, a new Marvel show, new Final Fantasy games, a potential Biden impeachment, and reddit's implosion as a news story itself, Reddit ought to be booming right now, not "normal". That there are incredible surges of people in subreddits participating in reddit drama should be a warning sign, the way a Fogo De Chao ought to be worried when two dozen PETA people sit down at each table.
- I solved the muscle memory issue by removing Apollo from my Home Screen. I opened my calculator more times than I care to admit.
  
  I did something similar - but i moved the kbin PWA into the old place of the reddit app (yes, i was actually a huge fan of the reddit mobile app, it was the successor to alien blue after all)
- I had to uninstall altogether to break that muscle memory.

I guess, once the mobile clients stopp working we will see a decline

I’m only heading over there to see the drama unfold (for the lols, as they used to say) and promote alternatives, but once Apollo is gone, I will as well. The plan is to nuke my posts and delete my account.

All I know is I'm not there. So traffic must be at least traffic--

Do we have data on the Digg exodus back then? Did the traffic and time on site decline instantly or did it take a few weeks?

19 comments