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.

There is a big fat warning at the top of the page saying that the data is out of date, or innacurate due to the api changes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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m the opposite, read with adblocks then just downvote the entire first 100 threads which are basically half porn now lol.

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.

Ditto

i got perma banned once for… absolutely no reason. it got appealed when i asked why i was perma banned in my appeal

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 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

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

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 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.

1. 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.

2. 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

3. 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

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.

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.

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.

Same here

Reddit has gotten worse over time

It isn’t long before the final nail in the coffin gets hammered in

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Same

I’m still waiting for the day Reddit finally dies

It’s almost like removing the third party apps that the majority of actual commenters and posters enjoyed was a monumentally stupid decision

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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.