The reddit blackout is even more effectivte than expected! 5177/8829 (~60%) of subreddits are still dark [1] and the posts per minute are down to 1000 from 1400 [2].
This is huge. Subreddits were supposed to be back up yesterday. I personally missed Reddit the first day but now I am super comfortable here.
Glad to have found a new place to hang out!
Edit: Reddit has 100k subs, 60% out of those who officially signed up
any guesses to when the admin demote the mods?
Friday afternoon/evening to avoid as much media coverage as possible
as soon as they realize they really needed them and now they are gone.
as soon as they realize the subs stay dark and traffic from search engine drop.
as soon as the mods can’t use bots anymore.
Probably earlier than we think but still unexpected.
I’ve been slowly using reddit less and less as I’ve been getting accustomed to Lemmy and while it definitely has its problems I’d rather deal with those than let reddit think they can push around the people who make their site even possible to exist
I don’t think this data is correct. Yes, I observe a certain number of reddit-mods who hysterically close comments and ban dissenters. But there are a large number of sane people.
For me this blackout should have 6 months at minimun. 3 days do nothing at all.
Many subs stay dark indefinitely. Had over to r/ModCoord to get an impression. r/formula1, r/apple, just to name some of the big ones.
The -30% value is taken from the peak value, but doesn’t look at the total amount posted per day.
So I took the data from the blackout.photon-reddit site source.
It seems that it makes a Reddit Api call every Minute searching the newest Post and Comment and calculates both per Minute rates.
I wanted to see the effect the Blackout had over the day, so I summed the data and plotted it: Seems like between 11th and 12th June the comments/day diminished by -19.2%. The posts/day saw a decline of -8.9%
The sub with the most Activity was probably Askreddit
Very nice work, Post this over at @dataisbeautiful
I find it especially funny that the forcibly re-opened r/AdviceAnimals is constantly reminding everyone how douchey Reddit is behaving.
I think I’ve settled here. But I’m glad people are putting up the fight regardless.
Gotta fry the greedy porky boy /u/spez
Keep this shit up! Blackouts won’t mean anything to Huffman if we all come back after 48hrs.
Not hard to keep it up. Nothing dragging me back to reddit. the only thing i am missing is the immense amount of aggregated information
I wish it were easy for me. Just in these last few days from typical searches I do online, reddit is at or near the top of the results list with exactly what I’m looking for.
Where i the issue in casually looking for info? Use an adblocker and reddit doesn’t directly profit. The more the community grows here, the less you’ll lurk over at reddit
Only to add some clarification: reddark is only showing you the list of subs that announced they’d go dark versus the amount of those subs that have gone dark.
The exact number is hard to pin down, but reddit claims to have “100k+” active communities.
So 60% of the subs that said they’d go dark are still dark.
Correct. At best estimate that’s 5%of reddit communities but the impact in users might be much larger as a lot of those 100k subs have just 1 or 2 subs
Just a heads up, those 8k subs are just the ones that pledged to go dark. The actual total number of subreddits is much higher.
Still, 60% of subs still participating is much higher than I had expected.
I also didn’t expect that large of a percentage to continue. It’s very rare nowadays for people to resist capitalism and just end up complicit in the end like the Netflix situation.
I’m glad Reddit has a backbone against its tyrant.
I boycotted Netflix when they did the price hike and said they were ending password sharing and haven’t looked back. Been sailing the open seas ever since.
ahoy
Came to clarify the same. Title is very misleading.
Agreed though, actually surprised at how many are still dark.
Corrected. Thanks for pointing it out
Still, 60% of subs still participating is much higher than I had expected.
It doesn’t surprise me. Never underestimate apathy.
Wouldn’t apathy drive the number lower?
Apathy, as in they are uncaring about Reddit’s stance or how it affects others, and are only concerned with their own daily shitpost consumption and karma count.
That’s describing the number of closed subs going lower though, isn’t it?
You’re absolutely right. Sorry, I interpreted the original statement backwards.
When you lose 30% of your users because you got greedy about how ‘unprofitable’ your own app was, it’s gonna hurt.
The other significant factor is that even their recently-slashed valuation was based on some degree of projected user growth. If you’re trying to IPO and your growth has flattened, it’s bad bad news. If your engagement numbers are actively moving backwards, that’s catastrophic.
Looking at posts per minute seems like a great way to judge the effect though. I anticipate Reddit, Inc. will attempt to downplay the effect by focusing on numbers that take engagement out of the picture, like Monthly Average Users. If you touch the site once in the month, even by absent-mindedly clicking on a Google result, you’d get counted in that for June. And they wouldn’t report the July numbers until August because, golly it’s an incomplete month. And by then, their hope is that the world will have moved on.
Internally, I’m sure there aware of the impact. But externally, I believe they’ll cherrypick favorable metrics to try and control the narrative for the investing & advertising communities.
I anticipate Reddit, Inc. will attempt to downplay the effect by focusing on numbers that take engagement out of the picture
You pretty much described every corporation in the history of mankind. This is what they always do.
They lost more than 30% of their actual users. Of the remaining traffic a portion is just bots. Maybe 10%? Maybe 30%? No idea, but not all of the remaining traffic is real people.
I don’t know. Since the API pricing has not been applied yet, I assume many boys are still running.
The test will be if they actually lost the users or just lost them for a few days.
True punishment would be active, content rich posters zeroing out their posts and comment history. By doing so, the Google searches - which currently refer a ton of traffic to the site - will start to fade. The body of knowledge- users knowledge, not Reddit’s- is what drives new traffic to the site. I plan to remove my contributions later this month, presuming nothing changes.
15 year redditor, though only with ~250k karma. Scrubbed the crap out of my account. I’ll probably still use reddit on desktop for as long as old.reddit exists, but for mobile I’m definitely trying out alternatives.
I’ve been on Reddit for 13 years, and I’m hesitant to remove everything, in case I want to revisit some of my old posts/comments. Is there a way to archive your own content?
Yes this is the way to do it. It includes everything on your account even if you’ve clicked Delete on it.
Yup, send them a GDPR data request. https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043048352-How-do-I-request-a-copy-of-my-Reddit-data-and-information-
Until the 30th you have the API, write up a little script. Either get the raw data or store a snapshot of the post on the website
I used Power Delete Suite to back up and delete my content. Note that there seems to be a bug in the archive export process though. I had to follow the advice on this issue to pull my full CSV backup.
Just had a go with Power Delete Suite, but the export is kind of minimal, so I think I’ll roll my own with the API, while the clock ticks.
Yeah PDS is a good start but has some issues, if you’re comfortable with the API you’ll probably do better there.
Behold, yesterday’s quick ‘n’ dirty Python project: https://github.com/toonvandeputte/reddit_archive
I left Reddit but didn’t scrub any posts. Seemed a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Although I do understand why others thought otherwise.
Huffman has recently made it clear that he wants to monetize user data, so I think that’s a good reason to delete it, imho. I can still understand leaving it up as a courtesy to other users, but deleting all your content is a valid action imho.
Power Delete Suite will offer the option of backing your stuff up locally.
11 year redditor here, I scrubbed my account too.
12 year account myself
How do I give Reddit gold? Hopefully this works🥈
In all seriousness “this is the way”
Same here, going to do it a few days before the API change just in case they pull some crap to prevent mass scrubbing losses
GDPR (for EU users) and CCPA (for Californian users) both have the right “to be forgotten”, which means they must delete all your data upon request. Even if they block the third-party bulk deletion sites that use their API, they should still delete all your data upon request, at least if you’re in a jurisdiction with such a requirement.
It isn’t that powerful. They don’t have to remove comments or posts if they don’t contain any personal data that you can be identified with.
Don’t they have to delete all “my” data though? I guess I’m not sure of the specific wording of the laws, but at my workplace we delete all data that’s directly related to the user (data they created, plus any other data collected or logged about them), even if it doesn’t contain any personal data. The systems that handle this are super complex so I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of companies don’t handle it well.
Yeah, but with what they’ve pulled off so far they have been perfectly following the playbook for a “data unlawfully retained” scandal for reddit. Some GDPR fine.
Why not sooner then later, holding out gives reddit hope.
There are a few useful extensions and browser plugins that help automate editing your past comment history and posts to be blank, the same tool then deletes the post and comment for you.
Don’t leave anything behind IMO. I know I did not.
Kind of sad to lose all that knowledge though. I wish we had a backup.
There is, the-eye.eu has a full archive up until march 2023 https://the-eye.eu/redarcs/ (about 2TB total).
You can download individual subreddits too.
See here for more details (reddit unfortunately…): https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1479c7b/historic_reddit_archives_ongoing_archival_effort/
I mean there’s always archive.org and the various other internet caches that contain a large portion of Reddit’s knowledge.
/r/DataHoarder was encouraging that last I checked.
Man, you know it’s bad when even a sub based on data preservation is saying, “Nuke it”
I wonder if they moved here too. Would be nice, really enjoyed being part of that community.
It’s a pitty there aren’t many (any?) subreddits that are “officially” endorsing a specific community in lemmy (or magazine in kbin) for migration.
Thats true. I guess they are all till trying to figure out what to do. We also need to give @eduard and the other platforms more time to scale the infrastructure, setup moderation where needed and address issues… Imagine just 10% of reddit users & activity migrating over here in a matter of weeks.
I bet any post encouraging a migration would get yanked very quickly! The best bet is to pm people who were quality contributors to the sub, to encourage them to continue in a platform that’s open.
The few I’ve seen that have promoted alternatives usually just say something like “lemmy,” or provide a whole host of alternatives, resulting in a wide spread across platforms for the few that do migrate.
Isn’t that ironic
They’ve already got a copy, I guess.
A copy of all reddit posts & comments is being passed around there. Everything up until March 2023 or so. Unfortunately no community here yet.
Anyone knows more?
Edit: See https://the-eye.eu/redarcs/ and the explanation by r/DataHoarder (linked somewhere below)
I think reusing that data by anyone would be a very shady move. Not everyone who posted on reddit wants their posts and comments to float around in various places without their consent. I know posting online always poses the risk that what you post will be archived somewhere but I still think no one should build any new service on that data.
You are absolutely right. But the data is out there anyways. Reddit keeps copies as much as Google and other creepy spiders. The amount of aggregated and unified knowledge these dump contain is astonishing. For personal research or just preservation.
There are plenty of sites where you can already see old, deleted comments. So barely a new risk.
I’m wondering if that data could be given to archive.org for posterity (if legal of course).
The datahoarder community is on it, the posts asks for active support
2 days will do nothing, give them a week next time we do this
Screw a week, we should have gone indefinite from the start. Spez would have pissed himself
No, he would have immediately replaced the mods with internal people and internal bots, and turned off the “private” option. Frankly, I expect he’ll do that anyway, or, in 30 days, a whole bunch of them will be going up on RedditRequest - with a new group of powermods.
That’s fine, actually. If Reddit wants to “hire” mods then they can actually pay them, which hurts their bottom line. (And they probably should have done that a looong time ago, for the largest subs anyways.)
If they just replace the mods with more unpaid volunteers, that will be a shitshow in itself - just imagine the people who would want to do that “job” but without any of the effective tools.
Either way, 🍿
Let them. It will make their operations more expensive and the quality worse. Sure, users will stay, just as how there are still people on 9gag, Stumbleupon, FunnyJunk, etc, but this is all an engagement game and if the site is less engaging, fewer people will engage and other alternatives will get better as more redditfugees make their exodus
this
I agree, it definitely was uncomfortable moving from reddit at first, but seeing how familiar the site was, and how much nicer the community is, it feels more like an upgrade than just swapping platforms.
Also, I didn’t expect the protest would have so much of an impact, but I’m all for it!
You can feel humans behind these posts. No AI generated content. No toxicity, no “in conclusion” and stupid summaries. Amazing
I feel that so much.
No bots. No companies or agendas. Too small to be interesting to them as yet. I like it.
I’m with you. It really is amazing how much kinder this community is. I love it!
Been away from Reddit since Monday. I do not mis it.
Same. Missed in the first day maybe but out of habbit. You can see the growth in the community here compared to just a few days ago. Rich engagement, no toxic users and interesting & diverse content
