Just in case anyone here was wondering how Reddit’s numbers are looking these days…
Data and visuals from https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit
Did the actual comments fall or did the tool get hit by the API change?
That depends on how it’s written. The fact that it’s not showing zero completely makes me think they’d been iterating over threads counting comments, and they’re hitting API limits. But that’s just a blind guess without having looked at their source code.
If that were the case, itd be a pretty sharp ceiling not a noisy one
If they’re only able to get the comment counts for a smaller number of threads, those individual numbers would be noisy but lower.
For example, before they got 100 threads with counts ranging from 0-100. Now they only get 10 threads with the same range of counts.
There is a big fat warning at the top of the page saying that the data is out of date, or innacurate due to the api changes
Funny enough, if it is an API problem, then this is one of the scenarios that a scrapper could easily solve the issue and grant accurate results again. A playwright script written by ChatGTP could do it.
I read reddit with a client that uses a scrapper now. The fuck is reddit gonna do, block Chromium? They said they wanted to stop this, well, congrats, they started it instead.
ReVanced can patch most of the popular apps with your own private (free to use) API key.
Step by step guide if you’re interested
I’m sure Reddit is seeing private key usage sky rocketing on their end since ReVanced released these patches. Whether or not Reddit chooses to do anything about it remains to be seen, but I can’t help but wonder how long it will last.
Nowadays I still stick with Lemmy for general scrolling and only go to Reddit for my niche subreddits that don’t have active equivalents here.
Yes, a big factor, many users gradually left the site after the API changed. Also the sub mods have become increasingly ban-happy in the recent years.
The admins are banning anyone whi questions a mod these days, assuming they’re not puppets of them in the first place. Any sembalence of a distinction between mods and admins is gone
While you may be correct, I think op was referring to the the tool that counts the comments for this chart.
It maybe used the APIs to count comments and that’s why the sudden drop in the comments count. It just can’t count them as reliably anymore.
But it’s just a guess.
A bit of both I imagine.
Subredditstats logs about 1/4 of the comments posted on a given subreddit. Pick any small subreddit and check its comments to verify for yourself. Takes about a minute. 25 comments/page. Old.reddit.com/r/____/comments
I find it very interesting that this is reportedly one of the top subs on all of Reddit: “Comments Per Day” ranks it #1, by Subscribers or Posts Per Day it is #2, Growth (Day) and Growth (Month) are both #5, Growth (Month) and Growth (Year) are both #4, etc.
Not only that, it is by far the top sub by this “Comments Per Day” metric: it shows 15828 Comments reported in a recent 24-hr period of time, whereas the next highest sub is r/worldnews with a mere 5153 Comments Per Day, then r/AmItheAsshole and r/nfl also ~5k, then others rapidly falling further like r/NoStupidQuestions and r/AITAH each ~3k, etc.
To reiterate: this is the #1 sub over all of Reddit, with >3x more comments per day than any other sub, and like more comments than the next 3 subs all combined… and it still has fallen off a cliff, even by this same exact metric.
I do not know how reliable subredditstats.com is overall, but even if it were not so good lately, so long as all the stats are more or less evenly biased across all the subs, we should still be able to learn something from these comparisons? (please add a correction if you know of some evidence that this is not true) One caveat is that it might be harder to compare now vs. pre-API changes? But if it can be believed, the numbers fell from a peak of >100k in June 2023, to a more average ~75k, then dropped like a rock in July to ~15k and has remained hovering around that area ever since…
I do not visit popular subs on Reddit anymore, just one that has refused to migrate to Lemmy/Kbin, but this sounds entirely believable to me. If you click the links to the top posts, the very title titles of the posts and top comments to them also showcase the change: like the #2 top post to that sub is “Now that Reddit are killing 3rd party apps on July 1st what are great alternatives to Reddit?” w/ 78.1k upvotes, and has the top comment w/ 5.2k upvotes of “I might get back into reading books after over a decade.” (and other comments likewise, pointing to Reddit alternatives, and angry exclamations about the 3rd party apps going away)
In short, THIS seems to be the evidence that we have been waiting for all this time, about just how far Reddit has fallen / died off?
Although comments on Lemmy/Kbin I do not think have risen by +~50k or so per day, so I wonder where all that Reddit traffic went? Possibly as the aforementioned comment said, it went offline, basically nowhere.
Edit: I nominated this post to m/BestOf.
Possibly as the aforementioned comment said, it went offline, basically nowhere.
Probably depends on the audience. Discord for some, a bit of Lemmy, people maybe went back to old school forums too.
there is another site what the Reddit is Fun creator is gonna port their app for
If you read the subreddit stats website, you’ll see a massive disclaimer at the top that the data is inaccurate after the API change because the site owner didn’t want to pay the new rates. I think a lot of people here are overstating how much reddit has changed since the API shutoff.
Believe it or not, that GIGANTIC, absolutely un-missable disclaimer was not there yesterday… or at least it did not show for me for whatever reason, definitely on mobile Firefox and I thought I had also looked on desktop but now could not swear to it. I cannot offer definitive proof but here’s a snapshot from Sept. 28 - not quite yesterday but long after July 1 https://web.archive.org/web/20230928153646/https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit but still is missing that disclaimer. In any case, thank you for the note of caution: possibly results might be comparable across subs but perhaps not pre- vs. post-API changes.
Not that I don’t appreciate the cynicism, but by killing the api, could be a major dropoff in bot accounts.
this is not an opinion that should be shared by anyone who has opened a frontpage comment section in the last 3 months. bot spam has only gotten significantly worse since july.
the API changes had no effect on bot accounts, anyway. reddit corp specifically made an exception for them and other “low volume” API users - which is why you can still use your own API key to activate defunct 3rd party apps.
(yes, the implication is that normal users can go to hell if they don’t want to use the app - but by imitating a bot, reddit gives you preferential treatment. they want bots juicing their activity metrics.)
my guess is that subredditstats.com is itself impacted by the API changes, or this is a consequence of frontpage posts cycling MUCH more slowly than they did before the protests. fewer individual posts reaching r/all means less traffic and fewer comments as a result.
they want bots juicing their activity metrics
Seems like it would have been easier to just not destroy third party apps given that their traffic numbers have apparently collapsed because of that.
yes it’s always easier to NOT fuck up a fully functional product and drive your userbase off a cliff, but that’s not good enough for the huge IPO that huffman is courting. he wants to be able to say “look, we’re monetizing 80% more MAUs than before and earning 45% more per person”.
frankly i doubt they’ll be able to go public at all at this rate. if i were the Newhouses (reddit’s owners through Advance Publications) i would certainly be looking for someone to unload this hot potato onto.
The worst part to me was how they completely ignored the glaringly obvious route to monetization of “oh you like using third party apps? You now have to pay us a subscription fee to use those” because while that would’ve been unpopular they would’ve gotten some users to pay up for sure, and I don’t think it would’ve been as harsh of an exodus of power users that drive engagement
Has it gotten worse, or has it stayed the same while real people left?
I don’t ask to be a jerk. I’m genuinely curious. I don’t roll over that way often anymore and when I do it’s always for super specific things so I don’t hit the front page.
it can’t really be evaluated in a vacuum. the front page moves so much more slowly that maybe it’s the same number of bots concentrated on a smaller number of posts, i dunno. i just know that it’s inescapable on popular posts and the bots have hardly needed to adapt because reddit corp doesn’t give a fuck.
Reddit’s content has taken an absolute nose dive, I still lurk, but every time I think about posting, I close out the tab and leave now. The site has also become an ad filled dumpster fire.
To me it also feels like the ratio of low effort content posts or reposts VS original content has changed considerably. At least when browsing /r/all.
Same here
Reddit has gotten worse over time
It isn’t long before the final nail in the coffin gets hammered in
Wow I didn’t know it dropped off a cliff like that in July
Has the community changed much during that time?
Yes. Drastically. It is almost as big of a difference as when Reddit flipped, overnight, from pro Bernie to pro Clinton in the 2016 election.
Comments and post quality took a nose dive. And I don’t mean the typical summer change, I mean drastic and significant change.
What the hell happened in the second half of 2020?
George Floyd was murdered on May 25. COVID was ravaging the world. The presidential election cycle was in full swing. And I’m sure much more.
Anna I’m sure much more.
Hello fellow Gboard user. I would have also noticed “abs” in place of “and”.
Fucking thing gets worse every goddamned day. Thanks, lol
It does feel this way… but why?! Shouldn’t it be getting better with more training data? Is other people’s shitty typing data fucking up my experience?
Or maybe my swiping technique is getting lazy? I’m not sure, but it definitely feels worse than a few years ago.
If you make the same typo often enough and don’t correct it with the autocorrect feature (eg backspacing or jumping to the wrong character instead) Gboard will think it’s what you’re meaning to type and add it to your dictionary. When it comes up in the little autocorrect thing above your keyboard, you can drag it into the trash. You could also go through your dictionary and delete specific words as well. That’s what works for me anyways, not sure if I’m correct
Wait what? I can delete suggestions‽
Holy shit, I just tried it! WTF‽‽
Happy to help! Bonus tip, on Android you can hold the space bar down and slide the cursor left or right to bring it to specific letters too. On apple you can jump lines with the cursor by doing the same thing, just up/down instead
It could be that the people’s typing (and therefore the training data) includes so many different unique movements that an “average” of all of them doesn’t actually look like any real person’s individual typing pattern. Sorta how some one-size-fits-all designs don’t fit any one person perfectly.
Covid.
That was my immediate guess, but Covid blew up in March, and the Reddit graph doesn’t go crazy until a few months later. It is hard to see what else could possibly explain it though; I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s just an error in the axis labelling or something.
I would guess bot activity related to covid or any other american political thing
Bored people from the Coronavirus + US Election, if I were to hazard a guess?
I’m actually quite surprised by this, but satisfied nonetheless.
Same
I’m still waiting for the day Reddit finally dies
Nothing ever truly dies on the Internet, unless it’s a Google service. /s
deleted by creator
Does that mean askreddit is good again?
deleted by creator
Your forgetting “What’s the saddest sex song to have sex to when you’re depressed (sad)?”
what happened in the 3rd quarter of 2020? from 0 to 200k comments, and then down again.
Outages I guess…
outages happen more frequently than that.
US elections.
Ouch
Yeah, but I’m sure if you extend the graph to 0 it will… … … Ouch!
And they’re still ranking #1 on the Comments per Day category with just 15k comments. I’d imagine they’re way bigger than that
What’s happened at the middle of 2023 there?
The Year of the Lemmy Desktop
A certain movie starring a certain actress was shown only in theater this July.
You mean the API changes that stopped the only source of these statistics from collecting them stopped effectively collecting them?
This is most pleasing
What interests me the most in this date is the downwards trend between half 2021 to June 2023. I wonder if it’s r/askreddit-specific, or a general trend - since the site was already showing signs of decadence years before the APIcalypse.
