Hopefully I’m posting this in the right place, but I see Reddit developments as Tech news right now.
Wanted to share a website that is tracking Subreddits that have/will be going dark. It even has a sound notification for when they change their status.
The site is broken atm, but yesterday when I check it it was about half way between the blackout and the normal volume. (might just because weekend people have more other stuff to do?)
Yeah that’s possible. Quite frankly all of this is pretty moot for the time being, the real test is at the end of the month when the API changes take effect.
It dropped by about 2000 comments per minute and about 100-200 posts per minute. Assuming weekend peaks are about the same as weekday peaks that’s a pretty significant reduction of thousands of posts not posted and tens if not hundreds of thousands of comments never commented. That’s a fairly significant dent and could drop a stock price by a few percent, but certainly not a company killer.
The long term question is if this exodus removes too many power users who drive engagement, not to mention the effects on moderation and how reddit replaces or recalls the users it alienated
It’s sad though I truly enjoyed Reddit like obviously many here, but also to be fair I’ve also felt like the quality of posts and comments overall degraded and the whole thing turned into a big meme factory where only funny images with text and tiktok reposts really were uploaded.
The whole thing started going downhills as soon as the first tiktok reposts started flooding in to be fairly honest. Let’s please not let this happen much here, unless of course in dedicated communities for that because everything has a place.
I feel like this still depended on community. There was plenty of more niche hobby specific communities that were enjoyable. r/coffee comes to mind for me or something like r/fountain pens. I still enjoyed r/Analog although that had it’s own issues.
Yeah there are going to be quite a few TTRPG subreddits that I will miss. I really hope that the fediverse will be able to grow enough that niche interest pages can thrive here like they did over on reddit.
I’m really confused by the chart on the site https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/ I understand the dip annotated with the red arrow, but I do not understand the rebound annotated with the green arrow… With that many sites down, it should not be possible to rebound to normal levels…
If you go to the site and view by new it’s just page after page of /r/askreddit. Tons of people posting to it with nowhere else to post. So that would explain some of the rebound but the graph is still odd that it rebounded to exactly where it should be if there was no blackout.
I could actually see engagement staying relatively the same since most people are probably popping Reddit open for a few minutes, maybe engaging, then moving on.
What I do find odd is how consistent Posts per minute are over time. But it doesn’t dip or rise with comments. So now I’m wondering how automated a lot of posting is.
Reddit itself seems to be completely down for me. I wonder if this is drawing a lot of attention and just overloading them, or tinfoil hat, they’re shutting off the servers to hide all the blackouts…
This makes a lot of sense. I was curious about this too, but didn’t want to give reddit any traffic during the protest by checking out any of the subs to see what’s going on.
It must track only the ones that are private. It doesn’t show Explain Like I’m Five as green. They said they would leave a stickied post that is informative about the protest and block all new submissions.
Damn. That is only a tiny little dip in the post/comment rate so far relative to the historical cycle. What, maybe 5%, assuming the vertical axis crosses at zero? Not terribly encouraging…
My partner is a casual reddit user; the experience change was immediately apparent. She got bored and switched to facebook because all of the niche communities that the larger subreddits repost from went silent.
The large subs and front page just consist of bots reposting the same old content. The bots are easy to tell apart from real people just by eye, so I’m sure that reddit either has no problem with that or that they made these bots themselves to hide the fact that actual users are becoming less and less.
I’ve continued to tell people: This won’t kill Reddit in the sense of outright turning it into a ghost town. If your only goal is to make Reddit collapse overnight, you’re going to be disappointed. The quality content that many people here enjoy is not what makes up the frontpage of r/all or what a huge amount of passive users consume. Reddit has more than enough low quality trash to backfill the frontpage and keep users occupied.
Anybody migrating should focus on porting quality content. Let reddit live long and be a dumping ground.
It’s more about reaching a tipping point where adding a new user to something else (fingers crossed for Fediverse) makes it a palatable alternative for more than one redditor. The network effect is a thing, so it exists, and if enough people get kicked off of an app they like it’s not impossible to hit.
I see this less as a damage to Reddit, and more as an opportunity to diversify, make people aware of the threat of centralised corporate-run platforms, and to build the federated internet alternatives a bit more, to give them momentum.
I wonder how much the stats were boosted by all those people asking where their subreddits have gone. Today seems to dip lower than yesterday, probably because everyone by now knows what happened.
I wish someone or a dev could make this list in these website and propose lemmy/kbin equivalents for us the redditors to join instead. On the other hands mods of those subreddits if they want they can make a community over these platforms.
It is probably a lot of learning for them also that they don’t want to commit. Once enough or dedicated communities form all will join. I have seen a few of subreddits that went dark opened discord servers. I have a few hobbies and there are already servers that are better than Reddit, which I hope attracts users here ( for me it is VR/AR and 3d printing.). I am going to invest in programming communities here at least until other communities grow.
I’m hoping that a great deal of mods out there will continue to stay dark if nothing changes. And I expect nothing from Reddit’s admin team to change. Just let the site devalue for the rest of the month to bots posting the same garbage over and over.
I think you have a wider display than I do as I only have 2 columns. ;)
This one?
So I am guessing this is representing each subreddit as 1 not matter the size? Is it counting all subreddits that exist or the top 1500 (by whatever metric)?
My Reddit frontpage only contains a few minor subs still which are probably without an active moderator and some „going dark“ announcements. Very noticeable.
I just had a quick look on the front page on mobile browser, not logged in, and the top 2nd, 3rd, and 4th ‘hot’ posts are about the blackout, and the ‘top’ post is a thank you from the Apollo app creator.
(This is my first attempt at uploading a pic on here so 🤞)
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@beehaw.org
Rumors, happenings, and innovations in the technology sphere. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
update for 2nd day of the blackout
I will be paying attention to this the following couple days. I wonder how they are going to tell investor, lol.
I’d be curious to see an updated valuation
The site is broken atm, but yesterday when I check it it was about half way between the blackout and the normal volume. (might just because weekend people have more other stuff to do?)
Yeah that’s possible. Quite frankly all of this is pretty moot for the time being, the real test is at the end of the month when the API changes take effect.
Not much of a drop in posts. Is it 95% bot driven anyway?
It dropped by about 2000 comments per minute and about 100-200 posts per minute. Assuming weekend peaks are about the same as weekday peaks that’s a pretty significant reduction of thousands of posts not posted and tens if not hundreds of thousands of comments never commented. That’s a fairly significant dent and could drop a stock price by a few percent, but certainly not a company killer.
The long term question is if this exodus removes too many power users who drive engagement, not to mention the effects on moderation and how reddit replaces or recalls the users it alienated
Yeah, the drop will come the first of july, when the api become $$$ :D
Bots probably just scrape anyway 🤷♂️
blackout.photon-reddit.com seems to be down for me. Any idea what’s up with that, or other places that are visualizing traffic?
It’s back up!
It does have a pretty big impact on the first day already.
comments are way down
If the creator of the site is here, some guidelines across the graph could be nice, especially for the X axis so we can see what time each point is at
It’s sad though I truly enjoyed Reddit like obviously many here, but also to be fair I’ve also felt like the quality of posts and comments overall degraded and the whole thing turned into a big meme factory where only funny images with text and tiktok reposts really were uploaded.
The whole thing started going downhills as soon as the first tiktok reposts started flooding in to be fairly honest. Let’s please not let this happen much here, unless of course in dedicated communities for that because everything has a place.
Also, this is my first ever post on Lemmy, hi 👋
I feel like this still depended on community. There was plenty of more niche hobby specific communities that were enjoyable. r/coffee comes to mind for me or something like r/fountain pens. I still enjoyed r/Analog although that had it’s own issues.
Yeah there are going to be quite a few TTRPG subreddits that I will miss. I really hope that the fediverse will be able to grow enough that niche interest pages can thrive here like they did over on reddit.
Hello!
I’m really confused by the chart on the site https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/ I understand the dip annotated with the red arrow, but I do not understand the rebound annotated with the green arrow… With that many sites down, it should not be possible to rebound to normal levels…
Because that dip isn’t due to the blackout. Reddit was pretty hard down for about an hour.
If you go to the site and view by new it’s just page after page of /r/askreddit. Tons of people posting to it with nowhere else to post. So that would explain some of the rebound but the graph is still odd that it rebounded to exactly where it should be if there was no blackout.
I could actually see engagement staying relatively the same since most people are probably popping Reddit open for a few minutes, maybe engaging, then moving on.
What I do find odd is how consistent Posts per minute are over time. But it doesn’t dip or rise with comments. So now I’m wondering how automated a lot of posting is.
Bots, all the bot posts. If you even check “All” for a bit even on Lemmy you will see the bots are moving here as well.
Is blackout.photon-reddit.com down?
Reddit itself seems to be completely down for me. I wonder if this is drawing a lot of attention and just overloading them, or tinfoil hat, they’re shutting off the servers to hide all the blackouts…
Edit: seems to be working again.
My partner had the same issue this morning
My tinfoil hat is trying to make some sort of change to the blacked out subs killed the site.
Reddit is deddit.
Yeah I’m getting a “You Broke Reddit” message when attempting to old.reddit.com. I didn’t break reddit ‘you’ broke reddit lol.
I feel bad for the poor little Snoo :(
Curious about the subs that have reverted to public already… r/stocks just now & saw a few revert last night.
r/stocks is private at the moment, so maybe just an issue with the data collection.
I know some subreddits are just locking new submissions, not going private. Does this tool track that, or exclusively those that go private?
This makes a lot of sense. I was curious about this too, but didn’t want to give reddit any traffic during the protest by checking out any of the subs to see what’s going on.
It must track only the ones that are private. It doesn’t show Explain Like I’m Five as green. They said they would leave a stickied post that is informative about the protest and block all new submissions.
I’m going to guess just private, because automatically assessing how a sub is being moderated would be very hard.
This tool doesnt, but the one linked in the second edit does
Just hit 6600. Watching the sub names and the comments is a fun afternoon.
Damn. That is only a tiny little dip in the post/comment rate so far relative to the historical cycle. What, maybe 5%, assuming the vertical axis crosses at zero? Not terribly encouraging…
My partner is a casual reddit user; the experience change was immediately apparent. She got bored and switched to facebook because all of the niche communities that the larger subreddits repost from went silent.
My GF is also a pretty casual reddit user and she was pretty pissed about her favorite subs being closed.
This should be bumped.
The smaller/niche communities is what made Reddit interesting.
When those eventually decide to pack and the only vibrant communities are the meme subreddits etc then you would probably see a drop in usage.
The large subs and front page just consist of bots reposting the same old content. The bots are easy to tell apart from real people just by eye, so I’m sure that reddit either has no problem with that or that they made these bots themselves to hide the fact that actual users are becoming less and less.
I’ve continued to tell people: This won’t kill Reddit in the sense of outright turning it into a ghost town. If your only goal is to make Reddit collapse overnight, you’re going to be disappointed. The quality content that many people here enjoy is not what makes up the frontpage of r/all or what a huge amount of passive users consume. Reddit has more than enough low quality trash to backfill the frontpage and keep users occupied.
Anybody migrating should focus on porting quality content. Let reddit live long and be a dumping ground.
It’s more about reaching a tipping point where adding a new user to something else (fingers crossed for Fediverse) makes it a palatable alternative for more than one redditor. The network effect is a thing, so it exists, and if enough people get kicked off of an app they like it’s not impossible to hit.
I see this less as a damage to Reddit, and more as an opportunity to diversify, make people aware of the threat of centralised corporate-run platforms, and to build the federated internet alternatives a bit more, to give them momentum.
Yep! Although it is too bad that when you sesrch for reddit alternstives, that lemmy doesn’t come up.
Yeah, I was negatively surprised as well. Almost 60% of all big SFW subreddits closed, and still only a small percentage less posts and comments.
Reddit may also be astroturfing their own site to make it look like there’s not much effect of the blackout.
I wonder how much the stats were boosted by all those people asking where their subreddits have gone. Today seems to dip lower than yesterday, probably because everyone by now knows what happened.
I’m guessing (hoping) the difference at peak will be larger. All we can do now is wait and see, unfortunately.
I saw that too - hopefully the changes will show in the next “up” cycle. Apparently the bots are out to play as well.
I wish someone or a dev could make this list in these website and propose lemmy/kbin equivalents for us the redditors to join instead. On the other hands mods of those subreddits if they want they can make a community over these platforms.
Sadly all the mods I asked before deleting my account did not respond or said they where not interested on migrating
It is probably a lot of learning for them also that they don’t want to commit. Once enough or dedicated communities form all will join. I have seen a few of subreddits that went dark opened discord servers. I have a few hobbies and there are already servers that are better than Reddit, which I hope attracts users here ( for me it is VR/AR and 3d printing.). I am going to invest in programming communities here at least until other communities grow.
“6236/7265 subreddits are currently dark.”
85.83%
That’s a pretty good response from the subs.
93% now
I’m hoping that a great deal of mods out there will continue to stay dark if nothing changes. And I expect nothing from Reddit’s admin team to change. Just let the site devalue for the rest of the month to bots posting the same garbage over and over.
Is there a way to see what subs re dark out of the actual total? This looks like it is what % are dark compared to what % are restricted?
In other words I confused what the n is on all of these
https://blackout.photon-reddit.com
Choose ‘percent’ on the third card on the left.
I think you have a wider display than I do as I only have 2 columns. ;)
This one?
So I am guessing this is representing each subreddit as 1 not matter the size? Is it counting all subreddits that exist or the top 1500 (by whatever metric)?
My Reddit frontpage only contains a few minor subs still which are probably without an active moderator and some „going dark“ announcements. Very noticeable.
I just had a quick look on the front page on mobile browser, not logged in, and the top 2nd, 3rd, and 4th ‘hot’ posts are about the blackout, and the ‘top’ post is a thank you from the Apollo app creator.
(This is my first attempt at uploading a pic on here so 🤞)