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.
Hello!
“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.
93% now
It does have a pretty big impact on the first day already.
comments are way down
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.
On two we presented the options abailable (Lemmy, Mastodon, Usnet and so on), on the biggest we didn’t do that. It was a last-minute announcement, so didn’t really have the time (also too many cooks with different recipes, so to speak).
I’m sure it won’t matter in the long run, but should we not try? A giant company runs on advertising. And the time we stop users interacting and engaging with these ads can only be a good thing.
As I’m writing this, 4,669 of 6,934 subs have gone dark.
Its beautiful to see.
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.
I feel bad for the poor little Snoo :(
It seems like the servers are having some trouble [https://www.redditstatus.com/]. Couldnt have chosen a beter time
Now include links to their preferred lemmy alternatives
At the bottom of the site, it does say “use Lemmy for less reddit shenanigans” with a hyperlink
I’m really confused by the chart on the site https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/ I understand the dip annotated with the red arrow, but I do not understand the rebound annotated with the green arrow… With that many sites down, it should not be possible to rebound to normal levels…
Because that dip isn’t due to the blackout. Reddit was pretty hard down for about an hour.
I could actually see engagement staying relatively the same since most people are probably popping Reddit open for a few minutes, maybe engaging, then moving on.
What I do find odd is how consistent Posts per minute are over time. But it doesn’t dip or rise with comments. So now I’m wondering how automated a lot of posting is.
Bots, all the bot posts. If you even check “All” for a bit even on Lemmy you will see the bots are moving here as well.
If you go to the site and view by new it’s just page after page of /r/askreddit. Tons of people posting to it with nowhere else to post. So that would explain some of the rebound but the graph is still odd that it rebounded to exactly where it should be if there was no blackout.
Oh god here it comes. So long and thanks for all the fish.
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.
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.
I hope that if that actually happens they’ll find no volunteers to actually mod those subs and realize they’ll actually have to hire and pay the people that actually makes their site usable
Sadly there’s always going to be people that will do this just for the feeling of insignificant power they get from moderating a subreddit
Probably won’t matter much when critical mod tools suddenly stop working.
Probably yes. That will make quality tank badly.
@[email protected] can we un-sticky this thread please, since it’s no longer relevant?
The level of unity has been awesome. At first I thought this might only really spread through tech minded subreddits, but it really caught on broadly.
This is just beautiful to watch. For once reddit comes together to spite… reddit.
I found a different one, posted by the author on the DataIsBeautiful subreddit: https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/
This one is great!
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…
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.
It’s more about reaching a tipping point where adding a new user to something else (fingers crossed for Fediverse) makes it a palatable alternative for more than one redditor. The network effect is a thing, so it exists, and if enough people get kicked off of an app they like it’s not impossible to hit.
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.
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.
My GF is also a pretty casual reddit user and she was pretty pissed about her favorite subs being closed.
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.
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 wonder how much the stats were boosted by all those people asking where their subreddits have gone. Today seems to dip lower than yesterday, probably because everyone by now knows what happened.
I’m guessing (hoping) the difference at peak will be larger. All we can do now is wait and see, unfortunately.
I saw that too - hopefully the changes will show in the next “up” cycle. Apparently the bots are out to play as well.
