Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.
Tbh I think the vast majority of people that use these sites are just there to mindlessly scroll. I do imagine a lot of their reactions to the protests was to be pissed at the weird basement dwellers disrupting their porn/aww/etc feeds
More than anything, the fact that Reddit absolutely quadruple-downed on steering people to their garbage app at the same time probably drove a lot of that crowd away. I regard it like Twitter X now: just another rotting, closed-off corporate theme park - and I refuse to believe any content I hit a login wall after getting linked to is important enough to deal with their shit.
be pissed at the weird basement dwellers disrupting their porn/aww/etc feeds
LOL - I think this is a very apt description. For every person that has left, there are a dozen more like this. Couldn't care less that 4 of the 5 top posts are reposted tiktok videos.