• @penguin_ex_machina@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    It blows my mind that Reddit can look at 90% of its communities going dark in some way and think, “yeah, this is fine.”

    EDIT (AGAIN): Thank you all for the comments on total subs. It’s still clearly not 90%, but it still appears to be a significant portion of the active Reddit community. For the interested, check out the comments below for stats. :)

    • It might be as Louis Rossmann said, it was a mistake to say "we’re going black for two days. They should’ve just says “were going black until you cange the rules again”.

      • @Spacebar@sopuli.xyz
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        162 years ago

        Abstaining for two days is enough to break a habbit.

        Reddit’s traffic might not recover for a while.

        • @Nilz@sopuli.xyz
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          162 years ago

          Of course it’s up to the user to take action and abstain but if I open Reddit I see posts and can mostly scroll through my feed like it’s any other day. If I wouldn’t have known subreddits went private (and they didn’t sticky a message) I might have not even noticed since I’ll just see posts from subreddits who don’t participate instead. The power that makes Reddit so good is working against the community effort right now.

          The first thing I did this morning was open BaconReader from my homescreen before realizing what day it was. I replaced BaconReader with Jerboa to try and break the habit. It’s not easy and I think Reddit knows it.

          • @Mog_fanatic@lemmy.world
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            132 years ago

            Is this for real? I wonder if different people’s r/all look different. Mine is a ghost land. I would know something is up instantly. There’s like 20 posts on my front page with 0 up votes from random ass subreddits I’ve never heard of. The content of the posts on the front page is wildly different than normal too.

            • @Nilz@sopuli.xyz
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              62 years ago

              I never use r/all. But I just checked and most of the top posts I saw yesterday seemed to be there still, so maybe there’s indeed not much going on.

      • @AustralianSimon@lemmy.world
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        122 years ago

        Lots are just going dark indefinitely so hopefully it hurts them. I went to look on there this morning and their server response is worse than Lemmy atm so I dunno what’s going on.

    • @Tango@lemmy.world
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      232 years ago

      There are, apparently, 2.8 million subreddits. About 8,000 are dark, meaning that’s just over one quarter of one percent of subreddits. Even with some of the largest subs participating, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is no massive dip in traffic. There are enough subs still open with enough mass appeal that most people will just look at some other subs for a few days. And I’ll be honest, even though I’ve made an account both here and on kbin, I know I’ll still use old.reddit (with RES and an adblocker at least) most of the time, simply because I doubt any of the subs I actively look at will do any meaningful migration that would lead to a similar level of discussion.

      • @KnowLimits@lemmy.world
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        202 years ago

        Hmm, 2.8 million subreddits, but how many are ghost towns? I wonder if anyone has a measurement in terms of monthly active users or something along those lines.

      • @orclev@lemmy.world
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        162 years ago

        Of all the subs I was subscribed to, there were I want to say only about 10 that didn’t take part in the blackout. I unsubscribed to all of them. I am now subscribed to only subs that either took part in the blackout, or in one case one that opted to remain public (due to the nature of its contents) but is blocking all submissions for the next couple days.

        For me, once RIF stops working, reddit will be dead to me. I will never install their official app, and 99% of the time I’m on reddit is on mobile. I have no doubt that old reddits days are numbered as well and that was the remaining 1%.

        • @Tango@lemmy.world
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          12 years ago

          IDK, he said in the AMA that old reddit isn’t going anywhere, and even if he’s lying I don’t think he would immediately do a 180 and kill it. The way I see it, it will probably be around for the foreseeable future.

          • Concetta
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            32 years ago

            He was just bullshitting about API changes in April, he’s absolutely lying about old.

      • @Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world
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        72 years ago

        Reading comment above yours i dont think the 2.8million is correct and it also states that there are only 100,000 subreddits with over 125 subscribers and only 34,000 with more tham 1000 subs. Of the roughly 8000 subreddits that went dark there are someof the biggests subscriber counts woth some having millions of subscribers. I think based on that that its actually quite a hefty number.

        • @Tango@lemmy.world
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          62 years ago

          It’s also worth noting that many of those massive subs, especially the default subs, have lots of overlap in subscribers. r/funny with 50 million and r/aww with 30 million does not necessarily equal 80 million people because there are millions, probably even tens of millions, of people who are subbed to both.

        • @Tango@lemmy.world
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          92 years ago

          Yeah, it’s kinda crazy. I support the blackout but deep down I know nothing of substance will come of it. Their dip in traffic is probably not much worse than when a major city loses power.

    • Max
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      152 years ago

      There are absolutely not 2.8 million active subreddits. I just spent like an hour trying to find data on this. Nobody cites their sources. I used a dump of subreddit statistics from 2018, when there were just over a million subreddits. (Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/ListOfSubreddits/comments/8gzmmv/i_created_a_better_csv_textspreadsheet_list_of/)

      There were ~34,000 subreddits with more than a 1000 subscribers. And 100,000 subreddits with more than 125 subscribers.

      Looking at https://subredditstats.com/ the top 5000 subreddits make up about 30% (based on an estimated 840,000 posts a day by some reddit user on a subreddit that’s currently dark so I can’t give a good link) of the daily posts and surely far more than 30% of the daily traffic.

      • @Nogami@lemmy.world
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        -112 years ago

        Why would anyone even want the job as a moderator on a dying site that’s going to be filled with trolls and spam? Heck, you’d be better-off just getting a job at McDonalds. At least that pays.

        • @softhat@lemmy.world
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          62 years ago

          Indeed - I think they’ll manage to find mods but the quality is certainly going to leave something to be desired.

        • @ZappySnap@lemmy.world
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          42 years ago

          I agree that coming on as a mod would be undesirable in this climate, but I do think a lot of us as part of the protest have a bit of a blind spot. Reddit may be hurt from this, and they may slowly start losing users, especially if Lemmy or another good alternative start taking off, but let’s be a little realistic here. Lemmy has a total user base of around 112,000 people as of yesterday, though I’m sure a fair few of these accounts are the same person (I have 3 Lemmy accounts on three instances). Reddit has over 50 million daily users. (Lemmy’s active monthly user count is around 15,000 right now). Reddit’s monthly user count is 1.6 BILLION. If Reddit is ‘dying’, Lemmy has been dead and buried. (Yes, I know one is growing and one is shrinking this week, but it’s a little naive to think that will definitely stay that way.)

          Could Reddit eventually die and an alternative rise in its place? Certainly, but it’s going to be a couple years off.