- cross-posted to:
- tech@partizle.com
- cross-posted to:
- tech@partizle.com
Hopefully I’m posting this in the right place, but I see Reddit developments as Tech news right now.
Wanted to share a website that is tracking Subreddits that have/will be going dark. It even has a sound notification for when they change their status.
Edit: Adding the stream https://www.twitch.tv/reddark_247
Double Edit: Data visualization https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/
Damn. That is only a tiny little dip in the post/comment rate so far relative to the historical cycle. What, maybe 5%, assuming the vertical axis crosses at zero? Not terribly encouraging…
My partner is a casual reddit user; the experience change was immediately apparent. She got bored and switched to facebook because all of the niche communities that the larger subreddits repost from went silent.
My GF is also a pretty casual reddit user and she was pretty pissed about her favorite subs being closed.
This should be bumped.
The smaller/niche communities is what made Reddit interesting.
When those eventually decide to pack and the only vibrant communities are the meme subreddits etc then you would probably see a drop in usage.
The large subs and front page just consist of bots reposting the same old content. The bots are easy to tell apart from real people just by eye, so I’m sure that reddit either has no problem with that or that they made these bots themselves to hide the fact that actual users are becoming less and less.
I’ve continued to tell people: This won’t kill Reddit in the sense of outright turning it into a ghost town. If your only goal is to make Reddit collapse overnight, you’re going to be disappointed. The quality content that many people here enjoy is not what makes up the frontpage of r/all or what a huge amount of passive users consume. Reddit has more than enough low quality trash to backfill the frontpage and keep users occupied.
Anybody migrating should focus on porting quality content. Let reddit live long and be a dumping ground.
I see this less as a damage to Reddit, and more as an opportunity to diversify, make people aware of the threat of centralised corporate-run platforms, and to build the federated internet alternatives a bit more, to give them momentum.
I saw that too - hopefully the changes will show in the next “up” cycle. Apparently the bots are out to play as well.
Yeah, I was negatively surprised as well. Almost 60% of all big SFW subreddits closed, and still only a small percentage less posts and comments.
I’m guessing (hoping) the difference at peak will be larger. All we can do now is wait and see, unfortunately.
Reddit may also be astroturfing their own site to make it look like there’s not much effect of the blackout.
I wonder how much the stats were boosted by all those people asking where their subreddits have gone. Today seems to dip lower than yesterday, probably because everyone by now knows what happened.