Reddit @lemmy.world

1y ago

/r/AskReddit Comments Per Day, Graphed

Just in case anyone here was wondering how Reddit's numbers are looking these days...

Data and visuals from https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit

131 comments

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
- There is a big fat warning at the top of the page saying that the data is out of date, or innacurate due to the api changes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.
  
  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.
  
  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
- 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
- A bit of both I imagine.

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.
  
  Yes exactly, much of the people who left leddit have scattered across a multitude of social media / content aggregators.
  tiktok/insta/lemmy/kbin/bluesky/etc. there are so many, it blows my mind when people say "why then has lemmy not exploded?" without recognizing there are many many lemmy instances and many many MORE alternatives. It's not just a reddit or lemmy decision lol
  
  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.
  
  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.

The satisfaction of seeing this is hard to describe. Internet 1 : 0 Reddit

I do visit Reddit on occasion (with Adblock) but I haven’t made one comment or one post since I lost Apollo. Why? I deleted all history then deleted the accounts. I can’t even upvote and that’s my little protest still in full swing.
- Same. It's unavoidable to use it when it turns up in Google searches or for niche content, but I've 100% stopped contributing.
  The corporate world undervalues goodwill, both from their customers and their employees.
  
  Exactly why I stopped contributing as well.
  
  That's bound to go away on its own as people stop contributing and Google devalues it in favor of newer content.
- I'm the opposite, read with adblocks then just downvote the entire first 100 threads which are basically half porn now lol.

I was commenting regularly. Now I comment here, sorry y'all.
- I think that's what has surprised me the most. When I moved here after the API shutdown, things seemed pretty slow. But now it seems activity is really picking up. I would be very interested to see the fediverse growth rate vs. Reddit's when it first started. I'm just surprised to see how quickly things are changing here.
  
  The momentum is strong. It's rather exciting to see and be part of. We are the change we wanted.
- Ditto

I loved Reddit, until executives took a nosedive and their admins screwed my account over with a blatantly false suspension.
Swartz would be appalled at what Huffman has done.
- i got perma banned once for.... absolutely no reason. it got appealed when i asked why i was perma banned in my appeal
  
  They completely ignored my appeal. 0 response. Later that wrongful suspension was used to justify a permanent suspension.
  
  Same here
  I was recently permanently banned from a subreddit for being a “spam” account
  I tried to reason with the mods but they didn’t listen
  
  I got some of my OC removed on reddit. When that happened, I got a message from the sub's moderators about the reason. Sometimes the reasoning did not make sense to me but in most cases it was in some way understandable. (I am also sure I must've pissed of a mod of the German sub because at some point they deleted whatever I posted...)
  Anyway, what I want to say is: I got one OC post removed here on lemmy and was given no notification nor explanation. I only noticed it by accident. I hate it here.
- I got banned from r/sports for talking about Australian Rules Football, I also got banned from r/Australia for showing a Simpson's meme about taxes. So I left Reddit, 'tis a silly place
  
  Ya at the end I was banned from so many of the subs I liked that I was like, why am I even bothering to comment here? Ive said it many times no ban should be forever, we dont put people in jail forever and we should not ban accounts forever unless they can be proven to be bots, but then they should just be blocked before they ever get access to the system. But I gave up trying to convince reddit of that face and just left, its a cesspool now.
- I got banned because an egomaniac janny spammer I outed as a reactionary stalked me around the site and kept reporting my comments, and I got tired of appealing and having the admins ban their alts while allowing them to still operate on the site.
  Basically they ran a bunch of political subs that appealed to Reddit's userbase, but also had self-published a red/rape-pill book, and other actual copaganda materials that made light of police violence etc for police unions. They would ban anyone who mentioned this and report anyone who posted his other materials as doxxing attempts, even though they themselves would advertise the same materials and their own persona as a writer+comic artist.

I clicked on an AskReddit link in google earlier today and wow the posts that receive engagement there now... From the little I've seen since leaving, reddit in general has dropped off a fuckin cliff in regards to content quality
- I seen that too. It has become especially apparent on a small sub I still view as it didn't really migrate.
  It went from people in their 20s discussing shared experiences with a medical condition, with the occasional high schooler dropping by to ask something. To babys first experiences, with condition. Absolutely filled to the brim with 13-17 year olds.
  I'm fine with them being there and asking questions and talking, but not when every post and comment is just more teenage drama.
  I seen a similar thing on another sub, while that has always screwed younger then the first, it definitely feels like it dropped like 5 years in average age.
- They alienated percisly thewrong subset of users

Not sure I believe it. A drop off like this is absolute death spiral territory, and the exodus of users would be way more clear, as places like here would have exploded in new accounts. These people aren’t just going to go outside, so where are the commensurate rises in activity on other websites?
- Well, I started just playing more my game backlog on Steam and finding other things to do that wasn't scrolling the interwebs most of the time. I come here, sure, but no where near as much as I did on reddit, and I don't comment here nearly as much as I did there either.
  
  I quit reddit when they started charging for API. I started engaging with my local library. I'm 35 years old and started reading my local newspaper for the first time ever in my life.
  I came back to Reddit only to discover lemmy and now I read both my local news and lemmy.
  It's been nice. Calmer, less stressful. It feels good again and I realize now that I've been very unhappy with reddit for many years now.
- I actually did stop engaging as much after eliminating Reddit. Lemmy is nice sometimes, but I'm nowhere near as active. I probably post a few more YouTube comments, that's about it.
  
  Yeah same here. I used to comment on reddit multiple times a day, I comment on Lemmy maybe once or twice a week. There's just not as much here that inspires me. It's okay, though, and I'm reading more books.
  
  Same. I check Lemmy once or twice a day and comment less than on Reddit by far. I still feel more satisfied than I ever did on Reddit and I enjoy the community much more.
- Something like 80% of reddit users don't interact at all and like 80% don't comment. So a tiny portion of reddit users actually generate comments.
  Comments don't tend to be linear, more comments drive more people to engage which means more comments, so it forms a near exponential curve
  Other websites HAVE seen and explosion in activity. Look at a similar graph for lemmy and you'll see a huge rise. Maybe not 1 to 1, but enough that if you extrapolate the same to other websites you can account for all the missing users.
- Yeah that kind of a drop looks more to me like a change in reporting
  
  They did change the API right around then, which is how this data would get pulled.
  
  It could also be a very good explanation. Too bad that this site doesn't document its methodology and that reddit will never confirm such numbers.
  However I am still certain that quality has dropped overall on most subreddits. An acceleration of what started a while ago.
- a) a lot of accounts are bots, and depending on how they are implemented, a LOT of these have remained (or even were created) after the API changes - remember, it's easy to spin up 1000s of these to each provide small traffic so as to not run up against the API limits. Overall, I suspect a ton more bots are there now, b/c the bot defense effort was suspended, b/c unlike a single bot, that one needs to look at ALL traffic (I suppose it could be re-written from scratch in a decentralized manner but... the developers did not choose to do that).
  b) a lot of people who remain on Reddit, including myself, offer it WAY less traffic than before. I used to be a mod of a small sub, which I quit, so I went from checking it almost literally hourly, so at most once a day, and most days I do not even comment at all. Also, I used to browse r/all (actually, "popular"), but now I never do, instead preferring Lemmy/Kbin for that. My personal traffic dropped off a cliff just like this image shows, in fact probably a lot more so. Although I still do visit that small gaming sub, b/c while there is a version of it here, instead of like 5 posts a day we get at most 1 per week, which less than a handful interact with. So that is not an "exodus of users" so much as a (vast) reduction of interaction, which still impacts their advertising revenue and thus the continuity of Reddit as a corporate entity.
  c) as people are saying, not everyone came to Lemmy/Kbin. Some went to Mastodon, others just stopped going online as much, and like myself I comment now a lot less than I used to, though I read just as much (here, not there). So just b/c the traffic did not come "here", does not mean that it did not leave "there". i.e., think of the shock of the event as making people regress more to lurking and not feel as comfortable interacting, especially given the lack of ability of smaller magazines (what are those called on Lemmy again?) here. Thus, even if they did not "go outside", they still may not be interacting on Reddit.
  
  People asking this often forget that spending less time online is an option as well. I would say I was pretty addicted to reddit doomscrolling between 3 and 8 hours per day. I exclusively use Lemmy now and doomscrolling just does not work here, so I spend 30-60 min per day here and have much more time to read books now, something I wanted to pursue more for a long time.
- The whales stopped posting, since those were most affected by the API ban.
  The rest of the users are still there, but the content is just limited now.
- I don't think all of those people just up and stopped using Reddit. My guess is a lot of them stopped engaging or even logging in and just lurk these days.

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.
  
  Yes and garbage subs being promoted as well.... Like Outfits anD AITAH.
- Same here
  Reddit has gotten worse over time
  It isn’t long before the final nail in the coffin gets hammered in

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

80% year on year drop is impressive
- It's almost like removing the third party apps that the majority of actual commenters and posters enjoyed was a monumentally stupid decision
  
  I'm still sickened when I want to see a piece of media discussed and a few niggles with lemmy but I hate reddit now so I can't go back.

And it's not just r/askreddit all subreddits I tried show a similar drop, including the ones that still seem relatively active.

I figured the highest engagement users would leave because they'd care the most about the api changes but wow, I checked a few subs and they all had harsh engagement drops just like askreddit.

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".
- 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?

You mean the API changes that stopped the only source of these statistics from collecting them stopped effectively collecting them?

Does that mean askreddit is good again?
- Do you do the sex? What's the saddest song ever? What's the sexiest sex ever? Sad song? Sex?
  
  Your forgetting "What's the saddest sex song to have sex to when you're depressed (sad)?"
  
  No joke, the two posts I saw in the related section under some fuckin question i found from google was along the lines of 'have you had sex with a disabled person? how was it?' and the other was 'women of reddit, what do you think during doggy style'
  like what the fuck?? Who engages with this trash (aside from all the bots)
- Nope. It just means there are bots left chatting amongst themselves ;)

This is most pleasing

Ouch
- Yeah, but I'm sure if you extend the graph to 0 it will... ... ... Ouch!

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.
- Blackout protest for George Floyd if I remember correctly, that might have been the previous dip in 2020 though.

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

Did they opt out of appearing in all? I know a subreddit that had a similar drop after doing it.

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.
- Alot of grass was touched apparently
- Maybe a subreddit blackout

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.

131 comments