Excerpt:
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.
The completely unblockable hegetsus ads were really what made me switch to Apollo from the official Reddit app. Then killing third party apps made me leave for good. Bravo, Reddit
They could have done so much. Force third party apps to use their ads or make a reddit premium subscription. Instead they decided to destroy all their free labor.
Greed comes for every company eventually.
I wish that was true.
Waiting for this to hit Nestle since their early times.
Other than Lemmy, where did users go?
Outside lol.
I’m honestly curious too.
They obviously didn’t all come here. I wonder how many we’re talking about. Maybe they just sort of dispersed into the various other social media sites?
/r/outside ? I thought people left reddit /s
Because the most active contributing users left. I used to comment a lot on reddit, but I’ve been exclusively on Lemmy since my 3rd party app was axed.
And I’ve been very active here. Like, even on this alt account that I made 16 days ago, my app says my post “karma” is already higher than my reddit comment karma was from over a decade.
I feel more willing to contribute because there’s a sense of community, and I’m not just providing free entertainment for a company to profit off of.
You’re not alone. Just check https://subredditstats.com/r/technology or any other sub you used to visit and you’ll see a clear drop in comments/day. After the APIcalypse, so many people just left and never came back.
Is this data really accurate? The difference is insane for every subreddit I checked.
I think so, all the older data points make sense (you can clearly make out the begin of COVID and the Ukraine war). It’s really insane, 50-90% less activity is no exaggeration.
YouTube is strong because it has an evergreen library. Reddit relies on the present. That makes it much easier to change platform.
I’m happy to see that the big German communities declined by more than half, and went from growth to decline
Well, they did say that about only the 10% of users were the ones who make comments and engage with the communities, and guess what, that 10% did use more likely than not, the third party apps. I’ve been a redditor for more than 16 years with a lot of karma, I deleted all my accounts but one, the oldest I had. I’ve been back for a couple of niche communities but I haven’t commented nor upvoted anything.
Lurking is fine. It just uses their server resources and doesn’t give them much value