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/
It’s sad though I truly enjoyed Reddit like obviously many here, but also to be fair I’ve also felt like the quality of posts and comments overall degraded and the whole thing turned into a big meme factory where only funny images with text and tiktok reposts really were uploaded.
The whole thing started going downhills as soon as the first tiktok reposts started flooding in to be fairly honest. Let’s please not let this happen much here, unless of course in dedicated communities for that because everything has a place.
Also, this is my first ever post on Lemmy, hi 👋
I feel like this still depended on community. There was plenty of more niche hobby specific communities that were enjoyable. r/coffee comes to mind for me or something like r/fountain pens. I still enjoyed r/Analog although that had it’s own issues.
Yeah there are going to be quite a few TTRPG subreddits that I will miss. I really hope that the fediverse will be able to grow enough that niche interest pages can thrive here like they did over on reddit.
Just flipped the switch (so to speak) on a couple subs I moderate, and the largest (just shy of 1m users) will be going dark in a few hours.
What surprised me most is how well the members are took it. To be fair the subs I moderated are typically quite tech-minded, so everyone is quite in-the-know with what is happening and why.
It makes me furious that a site built and maintained by the users is being exploited at the users’ expense.
I hope Reddit bleeds money from this silly line they drew in the sand.
I’m curious if you directed the users of those subs to any particular alternative?
I mean, apparently they are already bleeding money, but I doubt that these changes are going to do much to help in that regard.
It does have a pretty big impact on the first day already.
“6236/7265 subreddits are currently dark.”
85.83%
That’s a pretty good response from the subs.
I’m hoping that a great deal of mods out there will continue to stay dark if nothing changes. And I expect nothing from Reddit’s admin team to change. Just let the site devalue for the rest of the month to bots posting the same garbage over and over.
update for 2nd day of the blackout
Not much of a drop in posts. Is it 95% bot driven anyway?
Yeah, the drop will come the first of july, when the api become $$$ :D
Bots probably just scrape anyway 🤷♂️
It dropped by about 2000 comments per minute and about 100-200 posts per minute. Assuming weekend peaks are about the same as weekday peaks that’s a pretty significant reduction of thousands of posts not posted and tens if not hundreds of thousands of comments never commented. That’s a fairly significant dent and could drop a stock price by a few percent, but certainly not a company killer.
The long term question is if this exodus removes too many power users who drive engagement, not to mention the effects on moderation and how reddit replaces or recalls the users it alienated
I will be paying attention to this the following couple days. I wonder how they are going to tell investor, lol.
I’d be curious to see an updated valuation
The site is broken atm, but yesterday when I check it it was about half way between the blackout and the normal volume. (might just because weekend people have more other stuff to do?)
Yeah that’s possible. Quite frankly all of this is pretty moot for the time being, the real test is at the end of the month when the API changes take effect.
I don’t see myself going back to Reddit if they keep those subs closed down. However I do believe that if this “strike” goes on for longer than a week or so, the admins will forcefully replace each closed subreddit mods to make them live again.
Probably yes. That will make quality tank badly.
blackout.photon-reddit.com seems to be down for me. Any idea what’s up with that, or other places that are visualizing traffic?
It’s back up!
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.
I saw that too - hopefully the changes will show in the next “up” cycle. Apparently the bots are out to play as well.
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.
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.
Reddit may also be astroturfing their own site to make it look like there’s not much effect of the blackout.
I’m guessing (hoping) the difference at peak will be larger. All we can do now is wait and see, unfortunately.
This is just beautiful to watch. For once reddit comes together to spite… reddit.
Reddit is deddit.
Yeah I’m getting a “You Broke Reddit” message when attempting to old.reddit.com. I didn’t break reddit ‘you’ broke reddit lol.
This one has a pretty nice look with a list of all 6000 participating subreddits and fading in in real-time when a subreddit goes dark:
Check for r/argentina, could not find it but it will be dark temporarily, maybe it’s because of that. Great site!
Is blackout.photon-reddit.com down?
Time to sit back, relax, and watch
the worldReddit burn 😎 🍿I wish someone or a dev could make this list in these website and propose lemmy/kbin equivalents for us the redditors to join instead. On the other hands mods of those subreddits if they want they can make a community over these platforms.
Sadly all the mods I asked before deleting my account did not respond or said they where not interested on migrating
It is probably a lot of learning for them also that they don’t want to commit. Once enough or dedicated communities form all will join. I have seen a few of subreddits that went dark opened discord servers. I have a few hobbies and there are already servers that are better than Reddit, which I hope attracts users here ( for me it is VR/AR and 3d printing.). I am going to invest in programming communities here at least until other communities grow.
