Reddit Blackout Tracker
Reddit Blackout Tracker
Tracking the scale of the reddit blackout in real time, across the top 1500 most popular subreddits.
It seems that activity in Reddit was considerably slower around the 1st of July, by roughly 1.5k comments per minute. (For reference: the platform usually has between 8k and 3k comments per minute.)
I wonder if there's some way to measure their quality too, as I predict that it dropped harder than the amount.
As expected, not a crazy decrease in total posts or comments, Reddit will survive. I’m glad to have found lemmy out of this whole debacle and at this point don’t really care to go back. I do hope for more people to come to lemmy because I miss my niche communities thriving!
I am not sure, this is just my conjecture, but I think that what matters the most isn't being tracked - a relatively small drop on amount of content should be side-to-side with a higher drop of overall quality and diversity. So Reddit will survive but bleed, I believe.
(I'm also glad that this made Lemmy so much more active. Before the recent events, this place was really slow.)
The quality of discussion on Reddit will also suffer. They may actually gain new users from all the media attention they've been getting, but I can already tell that some of the subreddits I frequented have seen some of the best members leave and more people more obsessed with fitting in / upvotes and trolls shitposting. It doesn't take much for a niche sub with, say, 5k users of which 200 are really engaged with the sub, to change for worse once those people start coming in.
Don’t forget to help those communities out in the beginning. I’m big into Trap music, and thankfully the trap community migrated over to Lemmy somewhat, but it also requires me to post more and comment even more than I did before to help build those communities up. Content is what helps these communities grow, and especially good content. Keep people on topic for communities where they’re specifically on a topic. Like Twitter it was never going to be a day one knock out, but like Twitter it’s about a slow bleed over time that eventually leads to a demise.
I've been on lemmy for 3 weeks now and saw a huge uptick in activity yesterday.
When it comes to the decrease in quality, I guess some of the dropped activity will have been bot activity as well.
Not sure if that will be a smaller or bigger part. I guess the app users/power users they're pushing away will be more valuable than random lurkers.
It's possible. But bots always find a way, specially spam bots; if they can't get API access they'll do it another way, for example pretending "I'm a legit user using a legit browser, let me post".