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.
Oh, man, I’m sure the traffic is up… It took me FOREVER to delete all my comments and posts across 18 accounts. That 5 second lockout on API calls is a total bitch!
Most of the traffic of any given platform will be created by people who interact with it only passively; they mostly lurk and, for good or bad, they don’t care about it. Admins this, mods that, who the fuck cares, my cat pics sprout spontaneously from the internet.
In the meantime the people who actually contribute with the platform will be a tiny fraction of it. They don’t add traffic, but they add value - because they’re the ones responsible for creating the content (posting), aggregating value to the content (commenting), sorting the content (voting and moderating). The admins’ decisions and the mod revolts affected specially bad this group. And… well, not even the stupid like to be called stupid, and that’s basically what the admins did.
Now consider the link. The lurkers are back to Reddit because there’s still content to be consumed there, but eventually it’ll run dry - because the contributors are leaving the site. As such, you don’t expect the mod revolts to have a short-term impact on the site, but rather a long-term one: the site will become less and less popular over time, as the lurkers are looking for content there and… well, nobody is providing them jack shit. Eventually the site will be forgotten by the masses, just like Digg was.
I just wish that this process was slightly faster, specially before the IPO.
eventually it’ll run dry - because the contributors are leaving the site
I somewhat disagree… you haven’t considered the increased incentive for occasional posters to become more regular contributors as existing contributors leave.
As the volume of contributions reduces, each contribution is more likely to garner engagement - those sweet sweet endorphins released when someone upvotes or otherwise engages with your post.
Even if it does, it doesn’t really matter if Reddit can become profitable.
It doesn’t really matter what we think but what the shitty capitalists bearing down on Reddit think. They clearly pushed for it to move into crypto and NFTs and I wouldn’t doubt if they push it to chase the next hype of AI. I wouldn’t doubt if the restrictions in the API are AI related and Reddit has lots of archived comments and posts to draw from.
I agree in general with you, but AI adds a wrinkle. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if AI generated content continues to amuse the casual doomscrollers and reddit serves up a lot of ads to those mindless suckers and makes money for years with that model.
Doesn’t hurt us, though. We can move on and do our thing here in the Fediverse.
AI posting + low standards does throw a monkey wrench in my reasoning, but not a big one: that AI will be available first for Alphabet/Google, Microsoft and Meta/Facebook, as they’re the ones developing this stuff. And they happen to have services that overlap in functionality with Reddit, at least for people who are fine with AI-generated content.
Lots of people are probably just waiting for better apps for lemmy + the drop dead date for Reddit 3rd party apps. I am, anyway. I’d expect a shift in activity in July.
I read there are some issues with pre 0.18 versions of Lemmy with the latest versions of Jerboa. It should be fixed soon though, and an update as big as 0.18 for Lemmy should be rare in the future
There’s Thunder which is in the works, still missing some needed features for me, like media downloading, however it is decent for simple looking at Lemmy.
“Lots” in relation to the Lemmyverse size, but not in relation to the Reddit userbase. This chunk of the Fediverse grew huge in a single month, but it’s still considerably smaller than Reddit.
Thank you! (We need more content. Specially about other stuff than Reddit.)
That reminds me a caveat of the reasoning above: the “lurker” and “contributor” aren’t different people, but different interactions with a platform. Someone might be a lurker in one platform but a contributor, for example. The conclusion is still the same though, people avoid contributing to platforms that they feel to be hostile towards them.
No offence but I never understand this lurker hate.
Wasnt the hole idea of the web to have a website and be able to share your knowledge? Iam pretty sure that most people would just stop putting out content, if literally no one is reading it.
Just seems wrong to call those visitors of your publicly accessible site/blog/forum/whatever lurkers, or speak of them as if they would steal from your garden.
You’re assigning a connotation to the word that I don’t really agree with. There’s nothing wrong with being a lurker.
There’s encouragement to not be a lurker in the fediverse simply because engagement drives adoption and traffic, but I think the goal is ultimately to attract more lurkers
The content will stay, at least in terms of posts. If the value-adders go to other sites, someone will just repost that value back to reddit.
It’ll devolve into something like instagram, where it’s literally impossible to discuss anything in the comments. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean they stop making money.
The content will stay, at least in terms of posts.
Content loses relevance over time, and becomes increasingly harder to retrieve as noise piles up: pointless threads, re-re-re-reposts, “marketing opportunities” (i.e. spam), so goes on. Reddit Inc.'s actions pissed off specially bad the people who were removing that noise - moderators.
someone will just repost that value back to reddit.
Usually you’d have the contributors doing this; the lurkers don’t care about sharing. But even if someone/something (AI) consistently keeps posting stuff from other platforms back into Reddit, those newer posts will be further removed from the original source, and they’ll arrive later. Reddit stops being the “front face of the internet” to become “yet another bottom feeder of the internet”.
where it’s literally impossible to discuss anything in the comments. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean they stop making money.
In Reddit’s case, I think that it does. Reddit might’ve started as a link aggregator, but its main value was as a forum platform. Without the ability to discuss anything deeper than “two plus two equals GOOD! EDIT WOW THANKS FOR THE GOLD, KIND STRANGER!@!11ONE”, it’s just yet another link aggregator again.
I agree and those reasons you listed are why I don’t have any issue parting ways with this platform, but I don’t think the general public does. People do use instagram and tiktok to view what I (and I’m guessing you do too) consider noise.
And after all, the general public is who views the ads on their site and brings in the money.
As someone who spends time curating the content I view without any care given to what other people enjoy, I’m often shocked at how terrible the content on something like youtube’s front page is when I get logged out. It’s easy to forget that a lot of people just don’t care and use the internet to turn off their brain.
You’re right that noise is subjective (it might be noise for one, content for another), but it’s only partially so. Most people don’t like old, repetitive or misplaced content; they don’t like spam either, so those things are almost always noise. And yet I think that they’ll become more and more common there over time.
You mentioned TikTok and Instagram; that’s less about noise vs. content and more about high quality vs. low quality. Plenty people have low standards, but even those prefer quality stuff; so once content quality drops down (I’m predicting that it will), they’ll have less reasons to look for content in Reddit instead of elsewhere.
Also, note that 47.58% of the traffic of the site is generated by “organic search”. Once creators are gone, those 47.58% are going away, too. They won’t be googling stuff like “how to shoot web site:reddit.com” if they know that Reddit will provide mostly junk results.
It’s not impossible, just inconvenient. Instagram was made to show off pictures, so when you open someone’s Instagram, all you see is a grid of pictures by default. If you want to read the captions and comment, you have to click on a pic and then click on the 💬 to view the comments and add your own. In a world where most places only make you click “send” to comment, it’s slightly more work than most people want for an online discussion.
The comments by people consist of nothing but emojis and occasionally one to five words.
Scattered around that, you’ll also find a lot of bots spamming websites that either sell cheap stuff like LED lighting and swamp coolers with ridiculous markups (about 10x) or are straight up scams.
Those could be filtered out easily but instagram just cares more about the traffic than their users.
With moderators leaving en masse, reddit will move into that direction. They won’t ever get this shitty, but definitely a lot closer than they are now.
the people still on reddit after the 30th when the third party apps close down, i personally believe can stay there indefinitely. these people, and i, do not exist on the same wavelength.
I’ve been slowly trying to transition to Lemmy with this in mind. After June 30th, RIF won’t be working and I don’t plan on installing the official app so I’m trying to get adjusted to Lemmy before then.
Some of them will just be using reddit on a computer, not a mobile device. To someone who has never used a third-party app, they might not seem very important.
I definitely agree. The vast majority of people still left on Reddit are those who are corporate bootlickers and those who do not care and just want to doom scroll.
I don’t agree that the vast majority of the people left there are bootlickers.
Most of the people left there seem to be uninterested in technology from the arts and crafts related subs and that’s what’s really missing in Lemmy/kbin.
There is no /c/woodwoking, /c/printmaking or /c/embroidery and the people that usually visit these don’t really care about the underlying tech. Most of the time they just want to share their crafts with their community and things to just work.
I’m almost certain I’ve seen a woodworking community when browsing all.
I also don’t think it’s necessarily a question of subject matter so much as that Lemmy’s user base is simply not large enough yet to sustain active niche communities, and it’s an open question if we can get to that point without degrading the quality of the less focused ones, like /c/crafting or /c/diy.
Will a critical mass be reached where we can create our own communities? At least at beehaw that seems to be handled top down, we had a poll asking what we’d want - does it work that way everywhere? I’d like a local area community, but as you say, who’d participate? I might be it.
I think it will. It’s grown a lot and quickly too. I’ve been constantly keeping an eye on the “new community” communities and have not been disappointed to see all my favorites showing up.
I was happy to find a Futurama community on the first day as the new season approaches. Thinking more recently Dad Jokes was a new find that has brought me some joy. I’m always looking for new communities that are art related.
On June 12, 2023, nothing happened on Reddit Square Forum. The so called “Moderator Purge” is a hoax invented by communist/fascist Lemmy propagandists. Reddit is a great platform, the best on the entire world wide web. Lemmy is a backward spam-filled/virus-infested/ad-ridden website filled with communists and fascists. Long live Chairman CEO Spaz.
I didn’t know Winnie the Poo had a son named Spaz. Long live chairman Poo Spaz. May he forever ride hard on the magical head of a nuclear north Korean unicorn.
I don’t think so. Most people really are normies and don’t care. If there’s any change it will happen slowly as Reddit’s content and culture go to shit.
I think traffic is gonna plummet after June 30th. A lot of people are still using Apollo, Sync, etc. like business as usual, but once they stop Reddit will probably take another hit.
Possibly. However, it would be really interesting to see how many download the official app. Personally, the telemetry and ads are enough to keep me away, but I fully understand people, who say that Lemmy’s content just isn’t there yet.
Well, user traffic has returned to normal, but we also have to consider that it’s just traffic. Some of that traffic is also a bunch of people talking about Reddit, protesting, etc.
That being said, I don’t think Reddit will die from this, but it doesn’t need to in order for the Fediverse to succeed. All it needs is to push enough people onto federated services and kickstart it, just like Twitter did with Mastodon. We aren’t going to all switch overnight, it will be a gradual process.
I hate that I’m still adding to Reddit traffic but every once and a while I still do (search item) + Reddit because it’s still better than just googling something and getting 100 terrible SEO articles about a topic.
For example. I wanted to look for DIY dog toys.
I got hundreds of results with crappy clickbait, and ridden websites. Did +Reddit and got some great results.
Once I can do +Lemmy and get decent results my traffic will fall hard… I guess I gotta be part of that change, offering threads of my own with information I know. But it just seems homeless some days.
This is a good point. Because even websites which replaced others, oftentimes the older one is still there. Like even Digg still alive after Reddit got more popular. Some people say Tumblr’s dead but its really not especially for specific interests like games. The success of you isnt based on the failure of someone else, and its important to remember and not become cross because reddit still has users. Especially its been only like 10 days and a lot have already gone onto other sites.
Ok, those places are still “alive”, but have you actually gone to them lately? Digg is literally run by an ad bot who creates 99% of posts. You have to search down the list for a post that actually has comments. And of the comments that exist, it looks like a Facebook conversation with a few people, one of which is likely a bot.
Users are the content creators, whether through posts or comments. Pissing off a large portion of them will just leave the ones that don’t care about content, they just want something…anything…delivered to them endlessly. If the good users abandon the site, then Reddit will slowly turn into Digg, a link aggregator run by bots serving SEO content to users that contribute nothing more than “nice picture!”. And that’s really sad when you consider what the place once was…just like it’s sad to see Digg now.
I’m not angry with Reddit because it will survive. I’m angry with Reddit because of what I’ve lost at the hands of management that turned their backs on me. While their are alternatives that cover some of what I’ve lost, I know I’ll never get back some of it.
Digg didn’t “die” from a single change. It bled users over the course of multiple changes. The size of the waves was based on how many users were affected. The big wave was when they redesigned the whole interface.
I don’t think Reddit is done changing, so we’ll see where things go. I know that eventually they’ll kill off the old interface, and that will lose a large portion of users as well.
A lot of that traffic is people googling something and finding the answer on reddit and then getting on with their lives. it will probably be that way for quite a while.
My own reddit traffic has dropped right off since I discovered Lemmy. For now this place has the feel of the early internet: democratic, distributed and friendly. It really makes clear how repugnant Reddit has become.
I noticed the same thing about Mastodon vs Twitter. When I visited Twitter I would come away angry. (This was true both pre and post Elon.) When I visited Mastodon I would come away happier and with some interesting ideas. The tone is totally different. I chalk it up to the absence of engagement-maximizing algorithms, which tend to select for toxicity because that’s what gets people to spend the most time on the site.
Same for me. Lemmy still has some rough edges but even the apps that are available now are really good as they are. Improvements are happening at amazing speed. What we currently have is quite good in my opinion and this is the worst it will ever be, as we’ll have improvements on top of improvements, most apps and lemmy itself are open source, I believe that soon, instead of us feature pairing with reddit, it will be them trying to chase us up.
What’s nice to me is that I’m not replying to this on Lemmy. I’m able to use my preferred UI (Kbin) and interact with the same content as everyone else, connecting more people together. It makes it feel more collaborative.
Honestly, I haven’t seen as big of a push for redditors to move elsewhere.
It feels like Plan A was to protest the changes and when that plan didn’t work, there was no Plan B in sight. I saw someone suggesting that perhaps, at this point, it would be best to consider moving to another platform but the reality is that outside ModCoord I didn’t really see a coordinated effort to do that.
While everyone is likely to suffer in the long-run in terms of the quality of content, outside of losing access to some very cool apps the biggest victims of the whole ordeal have been the mods actually standing up to Reddit’s tyrannical behavior.
Reddit is beyond redemption, but for many people reddit is home and the plan now seems to be to comply with the orders and try to keep what semblance of normalcy and power each mod has rather than realizing that the point at which their votes, voices and free labor matter is over.
Indeed. These days on any social media, there’s a critical threshold for user generated content creation. Different for every platform and as social media expectations change over time. I think the fediverse has a real shot at sustainable growth thanks to Twitter and Reddit enshittification. Being able to see new content daily or even hourly as a measure of critical mass seems to have been reached here and it’s beautiful to witness!
Exactly. People also forget that reddit didn’t spring up overnight, and the great digg migration wasn’t a one-time en masse thing either. It was a slow bleed for 2~3 years even after digg’s v4 redesign. Those that stayed on digg turned it into one huge circlejerk about how reddit sucked and it would never take off, and people would end up back on digg eventually … EXACTLY like what is happening on reddit now. It will take time for Feddi to grow, but it will as long as dedicated users stick around and create interesting content
I am not sure I believe that, it might be that bots can be active again now that the subreddits are reopened, but I know that I am not back. And I won’t be back, and I think a lot of people are staying away as well. That the traffic is now normal seems a bit sketchy.
It’s interesting to see how the traffic is after 1st of July.
I hate to speculate but I wouldn’t be surprised when an article will comes out, stating traffic has not changed after 1st of July.
I know that I am not back. And I won’t be back, and I think a lot of people are staying away as well. That the traffic is now normal seems a bit sketchy.
I’m afraid that’s just bubble bias. Most people just don’t care or haven’t found a viable alternative yet. These +43k active users on Lemmy are huge for Lemmy, but not even a scratch for the other site.
After the initial exodus at the start of this month, you could see more and more comments demanding returning to business as usual.
[I’m afraid that’s just bubble bias.]
Huh, hadn’t heard of that one before. But yeah 43.000 is not a lot next to 52.000.000. I am still staying here tho
If Reddit experience a drop a 5% of its user base I doubt they would immediately notice. And even if they did sites like this (pcmag) would not consider that a major drop and so wouldn’t even report it as such.
But we all know that 5% of the users produce 90% to the content.
Im commenting before reading: I wonder if traffic’ll go up a lot from r/place tomorrow. I dont plan to participate know some ppl even who are staying away from Reddit plan to participate in r/place to put a protest message. But what I wondered if Reddit trying to ensure the mothly activity for June look the same as other months so the dip was not so noticeable. But how much does activity usually increase when r/place happened before? (If at all)
But ik also some ppl said theyre leaving Reddit June 30th, so maybe itll look different then.
Large communities organizing for r/place to discuss what they’ll paint is probably a lot of traffic.
I’m sure that most of the mods that haven’t been removed yet have some plans for r/place to really fuck with the admins
I think it’ll end up with admins skipping the 5 minute timer and banning users that draw over the flags representing those admins’ political opinions, just like last year. But the admins have made enemies now so the outcry will be much bigger.
I’ll personally going to participate and try to get myself banned without breaking any rules and if that happens, I’ll make sure to post about it. Let’s hope the front page will be filled with posts of that.
Now that i read it: i saw some ppl here wonder about bots posting comments or maybe downvoting, bc of apparently a lot of comments being against the protest suddenly more than before? And more downvotes on comments about it? If really bots are being used for this, will that also contribute to the traffic metric like a normal user would?
But that said im not sure if theyre bots, but i did see some people mentioned that they thought there’s some false accounts speaking on Reddit’s side.
You take away power users and people fed up with Reddit and the casual user who doesn’t care is left over.
If you look at blackout votes it was usually around 4 to 1 in favor.
During and shortly after the blackouts there were a ton of upset casual users calling the mods cunts, the blackouts don’t help, stop holding other users hostage, give me back my content!!!
Those users don’t care about third party apps, mod tooling and so on, they just want to browse the site. These angry users got the loudest while protestors took a break or left for the Fediverse.
If really bots are being used for this, will that also contribute to the traffic metric like a normal user would?
no: bots generally use the API and, even if they went through the web ui, bot traffic doesn’t generally trigger tracking (you could write a bot that does that, but it would be extra work)
Time to just look to the future. reddit will have a lot of traffic for a long time because of it’s huge footprint. So instead of making posts and engaging there, bring good content to Kbin and the fediverse.
Make it so useful and interesting that the good traffic starts to divert.
There are still some niche subs that didn’t come to lemmy that I engage in, but I spend more time on Lemmy now than I do on reddit. I think there are probably dozens of us like that. So while I might still show “traffic” I’m not spending near as much time as I did on it and since reddit is trying to go public they wont publish that little fact.
Anyone can buy an article, so I expect to see more of these “everything is just hunky dory at reddit” articles because again they have profit motive.
Meanwhile lemmy grows and grows. Hopefully people continue to engage over here to keep it interesting.
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Oh, man, I’m sure the traffic is up… It took me FOREVER to delete all my comments and posts across 18 accounts. That 5 second lockout on API calls is a total bitch!
I also wonder how much of the traffic is people archiving Reddit. I’ve been running it almost continuously for about a week.
Not to mention all the journalists scouring the site for stories and onlookers checking out the dumpster fire.
I think that it’s important to note the 1% rule.
Most of the traffic of any given platform will be created by people who interact with it only passively; they mostly lurk and, for good or bad, they don’t care about it. Admins this, mods that, who the fuck cares, my cat pics sprout spontaneously from the internet.
In the meantime the people who actually contribute with the platform will be a tiny fraction of it. They don’t add traffic, but they add value - because they’re the ones responsible for creating the content (posting), aggregating value to the content (commenting), sorting the content (voting and moderating). The admins’ decisions and the mod revolts affected specially bad this group. And… well, not even the stupid like to be called stupid, and that’s basically what the admins did.
Now consider the link. The lurkers are back to Reddit because there’s still content to be consumed there, but eventually it’ll run dry - because the contributors are leaving the site. As such, you don’t expect the mod revolts to have a short-term impact on the site, but rather a long-term one: the site will become less and less popular over time, as the lurkers are looking for content there and… well, nobody is providing them jack shit. Eventually the site will be forgotten by the masses, just like Digg was.
I just wish that this process was slightly faster, specially before the IPO.
Hey, the repost bots will still be there :-D !
I somewhat disagree… you haven’t considered the increased incentive for occasional posters to become more regular contributors as existing contributors leave.
As the volume of contributions reduces, each contribution is more likely to garner engagement - those sweet sweet endorphins released when someone upvotes or otherwise engages with your post.
Even if it does, it doesn’t really matter if Reddit can become profitable.
It doesn’t really matter what we think but what the shitty capitalists bearing down on Reddit think. They clearly pushed for it to move into crypto and NFTs and I wouldn’t doubt if they push it to chase the next hype of AI. I wouldn’t doubt if the restrictions in the API are AI related and Reddit has lots of archived comments and posts to draw from.
I agree in general with you, but AI adds a wrinkle. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if AI generated content continues to amuse the casual doomscrollers and reddit serves up a lot of ads to those mindless suckers and makes money for years with that model.
Doesn’t hurt us, though. We can move on and do our thing here in the Fediverse.
AI posting + low standards does throw a monkey wrench in my reasoning, but not a big one: that AI will be available first for Alphabet/Google, Microsoft and Meta/Facebook, as they’re the ones developing this stuff. And they happen to have services that overlap in functionality with Reddit, at least for people who are fine with AI-generated content.
Lots of people are probably just waiting for better apps for lemmy + the drop dead date for Reddit 3rd party apps. I am, anyway. I’d expect a shift in activity in July.
Any lemmy apps coming out? Found one but it doesn’t stay open.
Sync for Lemmy is in the work and a first working Beta should come out in 3 - 6 Weeks.
Thank you
Jerboa for android and Mlem for iOS are already out and getting better everyday!
I cant seem to get jerboa to work - keeps closing just after opening
I read there are some issues with pre 0.18 versions of Lemmy with the latest versions of Jerboa. It should be fixed soon though, and an update as big as 0.18 for Lemmy should be rare in the future
Thank you - ill keep it installed
Using Jerboa right know. I kinda like it, but compared to Relay for Reddit and so on, it’s of course not as polished.
Give it the decade+ that Relay has had to be developed and I bet Jerboa will be really awesome :)
There’s Thunder which is in the works, still missing some needed features for me, like media downloading, however it is decent for simple looking at Lemmy.
“Lots” in relation to the Lemmyverse size, but not in relation to the Reddit userbase. This chunk of the Fediverse grew huge in a single month, but it’s still considerably smaller than Reddit.
This lurker won’t (trying to not lurk here). I am happy to get away from there, enough content (and better quality) is here.
Thank you! (We need more content. Specially about other stuff than Reddit.)
That reminds me a caveat of the reasoning above: the “lurker” and “contributor” aren’t different people, but different interactions with a platform. Someone might be a lurker in one platform but a contributor, for example. The conclusion is still the same though, people avoid contributing to platforms that they feel to be hostile towards them.
No offence but I never understand this lurker hate.
Wasnt the hole idea of the web to have a website and be able to share your knowledge? Iam pretty sure that most people would just stop putting out content, if literally no one is reading it.
Just seems wrong to call those visitors of your publicly accessible site/blog/forum/whatever lurkers, or speak of them as if they would steal from your garden.
You’re assigning a connotation to the word that I don’t really agree with. There’s nothing wrong with being a lurker.
There’s encouragement to not be a lurker in the fediverse simply because engagement drives adoption and traffic, but I think the goal is ultimately to attract more lurkers
The content will stay, at least in terms of posts. If the value-adders go to other sites, someone will just repost that value back to reddit.
It’ll devolve into something like instagram, where it’s literally impossible to discuss anything in the comments. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean they stop making money.
Content loses relevance over time, and becomes increasingly harder to retrieve as noise piles up: pointless threads, re-re-re-reposts, “marketing opportunities” (i.e. spam), so goes on. Reddit Inc.'s actions pissed off specially bad the people who were removing that noise - moderators.
Usually you’d have the contributors doing this; the lurkers don’t care about sharing. But even if someone/something (AI) consistently keeps posting stuff from other platforms back into Reddit, those newer posts will be further removed from the original source, and they’ll arrive later. Reddit stops being the “front face of the internet” to become “yet another bottom feeder of the internet”.
In Reddit’s case, I think that it does. Reddit might’ve started as a link aggregator, but its main value was as a forum platform. Without the ability to discuss anything deeper than “two plus two equals GOOD! EDIT WOW THANKS FOR THE GOLD, KIND STRANGER!@!11ONE”, it’s just yet another link aggregator again.
I agree and those reasons you listed are why I don’t have any issue parting ways with this platform, but I don’t think the general public does. People do use instagram and tiktok to view what I (and I’m guessing you do too) consider noise.
And after all, the general public is who views the ads on their site and brings in the money.
As someone who spends time curating the content I view without any care given to what other people enjoy, I’m often shocked at how terrible the content on something like youtube’s front page is when I get logged out. It’s easy to forget that a lot of people just don’t care and use the internet to turn off their brain.
You’re right that noise is subjective (it might be noise for one, content for another), but it’s only partially so. Most people don’t like old, repetitive or misplaced content; they don’t like spam either, so those things are almost always noise. And yet I think that they’ll become more and more common there over time.
You mentioned TikTok and Instagram; that’s less about noise vs. content and more about high quality vs. low quality. Plenty people have low standards, but even those prefer quality stuff; so once content quality drops down (I’m predicting that it will), they’ll have less reasons to look for content in Reddit instead of elsewhere.
Also, note that 47.58% of the traffic of the site is generated by “organic search”. Once creators are gone, those 47.58% are going away, too. They won’t be googling stuff like “how to shoot web site:reddit.com” if they know that Reddit will provide mostly junk results.
Never used Instagram; why is it impossible to discuss anything there?
It’s not impossible, just inconvenient. Instagram was made to show off pictures, so when you open someone’s Instagram, all you see is a grid of pictures by default. If you want to read the captions and comment, you have to click on a pic and then click on the 💬 to view the comments and add your own. In a world where most places only make you click “send” to comment, it’s slightly more work than most people want for an online discussion.
The comments by people consist of nothing but emojis and occasionally one to five words.
Scattered around that, you’ll also find a lot of bots spamming websites that either sell cheap stuff like LED lighting and swamp coolers with ridiculous markups (about 10x) or are straight up scams.
Those could be filtered out easily but instagram just cares more about the traffic than their users.
With moderators leaving en masse, reddit will move into that direction. They won’t ever get this shitty, but definitely a lot closer than they are now.
the people still on reddit after the 30th when the third party apps close down, i personally believe can stay there indefinitely. these people, and i, do not exist on the same wavelength.
Only reason I’m still checking reddit is because RIF is still working. After that, I’ll see how much I miss it.
Yup, following up on some good comments and discussions I had, watching people migrate and just moving away from reddit completely over the next week.
People are still replying to me, and good posts are still going up. But in 6 days I will no longer be able to access it so here I am.
removed by mod
I’ve been slowly trying to transition to Lemmy with this in mind. After June 30th, RIF won’t be working and I don’t plan on installing the official app so I’m trying to get adjusted to Lemmy before then.
Some of them will just be using reddit on a computer, not a mobile device. To someone who has never used a third-party app, they might not seem very important.
Even on mobile I always just used the desktop version of (old) Reddit. I just love seeing the fediverse prosper.
I definitely agree. The vast majority of people still left on Reddit are those who are corporate bootlickers and those who do not care and just want to doom scroll.
Neither type adds anything to an online community
I don’t agree that the vast majority of the people left there are bootlickers.
Most of the people left there seem to be uninterested in technology from the arts and crafts related subs and that’s what’s really missing in Lemmy/kbin.
There is no /c/woodwoking, /c/printmaking or /c/embroidery and the people that usually visit these don’t really care about the underlying tech. Most of the time they just want to share their crafts with their community and things to just work.
I’m almost certain I’ve seen a woodworking community when browsing all.
I also don’t think it’s necessarily a question of subject matter so much as that Lemmy’s user base is simply not large enough yet to sustain active niche communities, and it’s an open question if we can get to that point without degrading the quality of the less focused ones, like /c/crafting or /c/diy.
Will a critical mass be reached where we can create our own communities? At least at beehaw that seems to be handled top down, we had a poll asking what we’d want - does it work that way everywhere? I’d like a local area community, but as you say, who’d participate? I might be it.
This just depends on the server admin. I’ve created two communities on lemmy.ml
I am at an over my dead body moment with reddit. I don’t care what their numbers say I’m not going back.
I was on that moment for years, just there was no real substitute. Hopefully, lemmy will remain big enough.
I think it will. It’s grown a lot and quickly too. I’ve been constantly keeping an eye on the “new community” communities and have not been disappointed to see all my favorites showing up.
I’m concerned people will get put off by the federation differences. I feel like it will scare people.
Which ones are showing up that you’ve been excited about?
I was happy to find a Futurama community on the first day as the new season approaches. Thinking more recently Dad Jokes was a new find that has brought me some joy. I’m always looking for new communities that are art related.
On June 12, 2023, nothing happened on Reddit
SquareForum. The so called “Moderator Purge” is a hoax invented by communist/fascist Lemmy propagandists. Reddit is a great platform, the best on the entire world wide web. Lemmy is a backward spam-filled/virus-infested/ad-ridden website filled with communists and fascists. Long liveChairmanCEO Spaz.There is no war in Ba Sing Se.
I didn’t know Winnie the Poo had a son named Spaz. Long live chairman Poo Spaz. May he forever ride hard on the magical head of a nuclear north Korean unicorn.
This article will age poorly in a week. And like milk in about a month.
I don’t think so. Most people really are normies and don’t care. If there’s any change it will happen slowly as Reddit’s content and culture go to shit.
Pretty much, yeah.
Speaking of which, has /r/agedlikemilk come to Lemmy?
Ticktock… The 1st of July is almost here.
“Corporate Reddit has control over the platform.”
The owner of a centralized platform always has total control of it. Anything else is an illusion.
CEOs are the dictators of centralized online communities, and act as such. And it kind of works, just like in real life.
I think traffic is gonna plummet after June 30th. A lot of people are still using Apollo, Sync, etc. like business as usual, but once they stop Reddit will probably take another hit.
Possibly. However, it would be really interesting to see how many download the official app. Personally, the telemetry and ads are enough to keep me away, but I fully understand people, who say that Lemmy’s content just isn’t there yet.
Kinda expected this to happen.
Well, user traffic has returned to normal, but we also have to consider that it’s just traffic. Some of that traffic is also a bunch of people talking about Reddit, protesting, etc.
That being said, I don’t think Reddit will die from this, but it doesn’t need to in order for the Fediverse to succeed. All it needs is to push enough people onto federated services and kickstart it, just like Twitter did with Mastodon. We aren’t going to all switch overnight, it will be a gradual process.
If some of the 3rd party app devs convert their reddit apps to fediverse apps, that will really get the ball rolling
Sync is coming!
I know. I really want Relay.
Omg I would kill a man if it meant Relay for Lemmy/KBin.
Me too. I used relay for years, it was my favorite of all the apps
Me too. I used relay for years. It was my favorite of the apps.
Lemmy has been around for 4 years compared to Reddit’s 18. Compare Lemmy’s current state to 2009 Reddit for a somewhat more accurate look.
I hate that I’m still adding to Reddit traffic but every once and a while I still do (search item) + Reddit because it’s still better than just googling something and getting 100 terrible SEO articles about a topic.
For example. I wanted to look for DIY dog toys. I got hundreds of results with crappy clickbait, and ridden websites. Did +Reddit and got some great results.
Once I can do +Lemmy and get decent results my traffic will fall hard… I guess I gotta be part of that change, offering threads of my own with information I know. But it just seems homeless some days.
This is a good point. Because even websites which replaced others, oftentimes the older one is still there. Like even Digg still alive after Reddit got more popular. Some people say Tumblr’s dead but its really not especially for specific interests like games. The success of you isnt based on the failure of someone else, and its important to remember and not become cross because reddit still has users. Especially its been only like 10 days and a lot have already gone onto other sites.
Ok, those places are still “alive”, but have you actually gone to them lately? Digg is literally run by an ad bot who creates 99% of posts. You have to search down the list for a post that actually has comments. And of the comments that exist, it looks like a Facebook conversation with a few people, one of which is likely a bot.
Users are the content creators, whether through posts or comments. Pissing off a large portion of them will just leave the ones that don’t care about content, they just want something…anything…delivered to them endlessly. If the good users abandon the site, then Reddit will slowly turn into Digg, a link aggregator run by bots serving SEO content to users that contribute nothing more than “nice picture!”. And that’s really sad when you consider what the place once was…just like it’s sad to see Digg now.
I’m not angry with Reddit because it will survive. I’m angry with Reddit because of what I’ve lost at the hands of management that turned their backs on me. While their are alternatives that cover some of what I’ve lost, I know I’ll never get back some of it.
Digg didn’t “die” from a single change. It bled users over the course of multiple changes. The size of the waves was based on how many users were affected. The big wave was when they redesigned the whole interface.
I don’t think Reddit is done changing, so we’ll see where things go. I know that eventually they’ll kill off the old interface, and that will lose a large portion of users as well.
Totally agree. Also, that’s just a great wholesome motto for life in general tbh hahah.
We should focus on building the community we want and people will come.
I like to put this simply as, “Put your energy where you want it to go”
Reddit has given us an incredible head start with the way they handled the API changes.
The people who understood what that meant and decided not to stand for it are the people who came here first. Should be an excellent foundation.
Beautifully said.
A lot of that traffic is people googling something and finding the answer on reddit and then getting on with their lives. it will probably be that way for quite a while.
My own reddit traffic has dropped right off since I discovered Lemmy. For now this place has the feel of the early internet: democratic, distributed and friendly. It really makes clear how repugnant Reddit has become.
It really does have that feel!
As someone who was around back then, being in the fediverse actually makes me feel young and lighthearted again.
I hadn’t fully realised quite how soul-sucking the corporate web 2.0 was until now I’m completely off it.
I noticed the same thing about Mastodon vs Twitter. When I visited Twitter I would come away angry. (This was true both pre and post Elon.) When I visited Mastodon I would come away happier and with some interesting ideas. The tone is totally different. I chalk it up to the absence of engagement-maximizing algorithms, which tend to select for toxicity because that’s what gets people to spend the most time on the site.
Same for me. Lemmy still has some rough edges but even the apps that are available now are really good as they are. Improvements are happening at amazing speed. What we currently have is quite good in my opinion and this is the worst it will ever be, as we’ll have improvements on top of improvements, most apps and lemmy itself are open source, I believe that soon, instead of us feature pairing with reddit, it will be them trying to chase us up.
What’s nice to me is that I’m not replying to this on Lemmy. I’m able to use my preferred UI (Kbin) and interact with the same content as everyone else, connecting more people together. It makes it feel more collaborative.
Me: Here, take my upvote!
Kbin: What am I supposed to do with this??
(But seriously, you’re right, it’s awesome)
Upvoting on Mlem on Lemmy.world!
Honestly, I haven’t seen as big of a push for redditors to move elsewhere.
It feels like Plan A was to protest the changes and when that plan didn’t work, there was no Plan B in sight. I saw someone suggesting that perhaps, at this point, it would be best to consider moving to another platform but the reality is that outside ModCoord I didn’t really see a coordinated effort to do that.
While everyone is likely to suffer in the long-run in terms of the quality of content, outside of losing access to some very cool apps the biggest victims of the whole ordeal have been the mods actually standing up to Reddit’s tyrannical behavior.
Reddit is beyond redemption, but for many people reddit is home and the plan now seems to be to comply with the orders and try to keep what semblance of normalcy and power each mod has rather than realizing that the point at which their votes, voices and free labor matter is over.
Indeed. These days on any social media, there’s a critical threshold for user generated content creation. Different for every platform and as social media expectations change over time. I think the fediverse has a real shot at sustainable growth thanks to Twitter and Reddit enshittification. Being able to see new content daily or even hourly as a measure of critical mass seems to have been reached here and it’s beautiful to witness!
Exactly. People also forget that reddit didn’t spring up overnight, and the great digg migration wasn’t a one-time en masse thing either. It was a slow bleed for 2~3 years even after digg’s v4 redesign. Those that stayed on digg turned it into one huge circlejerk about how reddit sucked and it would never take off, and people would end up back on digg eventually … EXACTLY like what is happening on reddit now. It will take time for Feddi to grow, but it will as long as dedicated users stick around and create interesting content
I am not sure I believe that, it might be that bots can be active again now that the subreddits are reopened, but I know that I am not back. And I won’t be back, and I think a lot of people are staying away as well. That the traffic is now normal seems a bit sketchy.
It’s interesting to see how the traffic is after 1st of July. I hate to speculate but I wouldn’t be surprised when an article will comes out, stating traffic has not changed after 1st of July.
I’m afraid that’s just bubble bias. Most people just don’t care or haven’t found a viable alternative yet. These +43k active users on Lemmy are huge for Lemmy, but not even a scratch for the other site.
After the initial exodus at the start of this month, you could see more and more comments demanding returning to business as usual.
[I’m afraid that’s just bubble bias.] Huh, hadn’t heard of that one before. But yeah 43.000 is not a lot next to 52.000.000. I am still staying here tho
NGL, I’m only there for the porn now
Yeah, didn’t find any equivalent on lemmy so far…
There are NSFW instances, saw them in the join Lemmy list.
If Reddit experience a drop a 5% of its user base I doubt they would immediately notice. And even if they did sites like this (pcmag) would not consider that a major drop and so wouldn’t even report it as such.
But we all know that 5% of the users produce 90% to the content.
Im commenting before reading: I wonder if traffic’ll go up a lot from r/place tomorrow. I dont plan to participate know some ppl even who are staying away from Reddit plan to participate in r/place to put a protest message. But what I wondered if Reddit trying to ensure the mothly activity for June look the same as other months so the dip was not so noticeable. But how much does activity usually increase when r/place happened before? (If at all)
But ik also some ppl said theyre leaving Reddit June 30th, so maybe itll look different then.
What’s going on with /r/place?
Wait they’re doing place again? Not in April? That definitely strikes me as desperate to juice the numbers like you said
r/place Outside of april fools ?!?
Dang, they must be DESPERATE
Large communities organizing for r/place to discuss what they’ll paint is probably a lot of traffic.
I’m sure that most of the mods that haven’t been removed yet have some plans for r/place to really fuck with the admins
I think it’ll end up with admins skipping the 5 minute timer and banning users that draw over the flags representing those admins’ political opinions, just like last year. But the admins have made enemies now so the outcry will be much bigger.
I’ll personally going to participate and try to get myself banned without breaking any rules and if that happens, I’ll make sure to post about it. Let’s hope the front page will be filled with posts of that.
Now that i read it: i saw some ppl here wonder about bots posting comments or maybe downvoting, bc of apparently a lot of comments being against the protest suddenly more than before? And more downvotes on comments about it? If really bots are being used for this, will that also contribute to the traffic metric like a normal user would?
But that said im not sure if theyre bots, but i did see some people mentioned that they thought there’s some false accounts speaking on Reddit’s side.
You take away power users and people fed up with Reddit and the casual user who doesn’t care is left over.
If you look at blackout votes it was usually around 4 to 1 in favor.
During and shortly after the blackouts there were a ton of upset casual users calling the mods cunts, the blackouts don’t help, stop holding other users hostage, give me back my content!!!
Those users don’t care about third party apps, mod tooling and so on, they just want to browse the site. These angry users got the loudest while protestors took a break or left for the Fediverse.
The .world instance has a lot of people with issues that have been kicked off of other instances and they are here
There’s a curious sameness to many of the anti-protest comments. If it’s not a bot, it’s a group of people working off the same script.
no: bots generally use the API and, even if they went through the web ui, bot traffic doesn’t generally trigger tracking (you could write a bot that does that, but it would be extra work)
The point made is that it would be bots used by Reddit to trigger tracking specifically to inflate stats.
Time to just look to the future. reddit will have a lot of traffic for a long time because of it’s huge footprint. So instead of making posts and engaging there, bring good content to Kbin and the fediverse.
Make it so useful and interesting that the good traffic starts to divert.
There are still some niche subs that didn’t come to lemmy that I engage in, but I spend more time on Lemmy now than I do on reddit. I think there are probably dozens of us like that. So while I might still show “traffic” I’m not spending near as much time as I did on it and since reddit is trying to go public they wont publish that little fact.
Anyone can buy an article, so I expect to see more of these “everything is just hunky dory at reddit” articles because again they have profit motive.
Meanwhile lemmy grows and grows. Hopefully people continue to engage over here to keep it interesting.