this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration
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Let's see if it continues through July and August.
I'm hopeful, but there is still a lot of content engagement over on Reddit. It doesn't seem like it's struggling all that much from a surface level observation.
This is (maybe) the "beginning" of the end for Reddit, not the "end" of the end. The big change isn't Reddit, but here.
When Digg fell, everyone moved to Reddit. When this API situation started there was not an obvious new solution to move to. Lemmy/KBin were mentioned but not readily accepted due to concerns with the content and capabilities of the fediverse. That is changing quickly, and the next time Reddit screws up, we will have much more active communities, quality apps, and fewer bugs.
Giant websites like Reddit don’t die overnight, death by a thousand cuts is how it happens.
No one expects Reddit to shutter in the span of a month or two, but as more and more people get fed up and move, the rest will follow.
Everyone who acts like Reddit can’t crumble when social media changes all the time are silly. Reddit won’t be around forever
It probably won't, Summer Reddit has been a known phenomenon for years. It's going to be flooded with even more children than usual.
A flood of children at the same time as an exodus of the type of users who actually upload good content to Reddit could definitely set up the conditions for a steady bleed of users away from the site, though. Especially with moderators' ability to actually do their job being impacted by the API changes.
Also worth noting that reddit control the metrics that they release for a lot of this.
There's no real measure of good engagement vs shallow engagement, so they can find a way to show that user visits are up even if the worthwhile content is starting its slow slide. Shit, i probably used to visit reddit once a day for 12 hours, but now i visit 5 times a day when i instinctively enter the URL.
So the metrics that reddit controls are showing that things are going down. How bad must things be that even reddit can't hide it from their metrics now?
If we could truly measure good vs shallow engagement, I wonder how much worse these numbers would be.
I think most of these are third party metrics collected from ad services, we've seen a few choice ones from reddit about how little traffic has dropped but of course Reddit will find ways to express an ever rising metric until they can't.
Facebook somehow reports near magical user growth, but 90% of the people I'm connected to it barely seem to be there.
I strongly suspect, but can't prove, that the 80/20 rule applies to reddit. I expect 20% of the users create 80% of the content and engagement, and that even if only 1% of reddit leaves it's almost certainly coming out of the productive 20%. However i'll bet Reddit will never start openly sharing stats about how engaged the top quintile of their users are, because that provides too much insight. Much better to talk about monthly active users and count those of us that flip over there by mistake or for one community we can't replace here.
It will probably drive away a lot of adults, though. Even if they are unaware of the Fediverse or don’t consider it an acceptable substitute for Reddit, they won’t stay if the threads are dominated by bored teens screwing around.
It’s already bad enough. On my single visit back a few days ago it struck me that the largely ignorant and unperceptive comments I was reading were probably written by kids who were just killing time and didn’t actually have much interest in the topic at hand.
Which subs in particular?
The largest ones like r/pics are still protesting iirc (protest engagement seeming to bring in less ad revenue than normal traffic) and some large ones like r/Minecraft have shutdown. (Someone else made a good point about the biggest subs not having particular tribes and thus the mods are theoretically easier to replace than a smaller knit community - but the ones currently in charge are still trying.)
Engaging over protest content seems to still be hurting reddit where it counts. Some subs have gone completely to normal (and this is what reddit is trying to promote on r/all) but it seems not enough.