The reddit blackout is even more effectivte than expected! 5177/8829 (~60%) of subreddits are still dark [1] and the posts per minute are down to 1000 from 1400 [2].
This is huge. Subreddits were supposed to be back up yesterday. I personally missed Reddit the first day but now I am super comfortable here.
Glad to have found a new place to hang out!
Edit: Reddit has 100k subs, 60% out of those who officially signed up
When you lose 30% of your users because you got greedy about how ‘unprofitable’ your own app was, it’s gonna hurt.
True punishment would be active, content rich posters zeroing out their posts and comment history. By doing so, the Google searches - which currently refer a ton of traffic to the site - will start to fade. The body of knowledge- users knowledge, not Reddit’s- is what drives new traffic to the site. I plan to remove my contributions later this month, presuming nothing changes.
15 year redditor, though only with ~250k karma. Scrubbed the crap out of my account. I’ll probably still use reddit on desktop for as long as old.reddit exists, but for mobile I’m definitely trying out alternatives.
11 year redditor here, I scrubbed my account too.
12 year account myself
I’ve been on Reddit for 13 years, and I’m hesitant to remove everything, in case I want to revisit some of my old posts/comments. Is there a way to archive your own content?
Power Delete Suite will offer the option of backing your stuff up locally.
I left Reddit but didn’t scrub any posts. Seemed a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Although I do understand why others thought otherwise.
Huffman has recently made it clear that he wants to monetize user data, so I think that’s a good reason to delete it, imho. I can still understand leaving it up as a courtesy to other users, but deleting all your content is a valid action imho.
Yes this is the way to do it. It includes everything on your account even if you’ve clicked Delete on it.
I used Power Delete Suite to back up and delete my content. Note that there seems to be a bug in the archive export process though. I had to follow the advice on this issue to pull my full CSV backup.
Just had a go with Power Delete Suite, but the export is kind of minimal, so I think I’ll roll my own with the API, while the clock ticks.
Yeah PDS is a good start but has some issues, if you’re comfortable with the API you’ll probably do better there.
Behold, yesterday’s quick ‘n’ dirty Python project: https://github.com/toonvandeputte/reddit_archive
Yup, send them a GDPR data request. https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043048352-How-do-I-request-a-copy-of-my-Reddit-data-and-information-
Until the 30th you have the API, write up a little script. Either get the raw data or store a snapshot of the post on the website
How do I give Reddit gold? Hopefully this works🥈
In all seriousness “this is the way”
Same here, going to do it a few days before the API change just in case they pull some crap to prevent mass scrubbing losses
GDPR (for EU users) and CCPA (for Californian users) both have the right “to be forgotten”, which means they must delete all your data upon request. Even if they block the third-party bulk deletion sites that use their API, they should still delete all your data upon request, at least if you’re in a jurisdiction with such a requirement.
It isn’t that powerful. They don’t have to remove comments or posts if they don’t contain any personal data that you can be identified with.
Don’t they have to delete all “my” data though? I guess I’m not sure of the specific wording of the laws, but at my workplace we delete all data that’s directly related to the user (data they created, plus any other data collected or logged about them), even if it doesn’t contain any personal data. The systems that handle this are super complex so I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of companies don’t handle it well.
Yeah, but with what they’ve pulled off so far they have been perfectly following the playbook for a “data unlawfully retained” scandal for reddit. Some GDPR fine.
/r/DataHoarder was encouraging that last I checked.
Man, you know it’s bad when even a sub based on data preservation is saying, “Nuke it”
I wonder if they moved here too. Would be nice, really enjoyed being part of that community.
It’s a pitty there aren’t many (any?) subreddits that are “officially” endorsing a specific community in lemmy (or magazine in kbin) for migration.
The few I’ve seen that have promoted alternatives usually just say something like “lemmy,” or provide a whole host of alternatives, resulting in a wide spread across platforms for the few that do migrate.
I bet any post encouraging a migration would get yanked very quickly! The best bet is to pm people who were quality contributors to the sub, to encourage them to continue in a platform that’s open.
Isn’t that ironic
They’ve already got a copy, I guess.
A copy of all reddit posts & comments is being passed around there. Everything up until March 2023 or so. Unfortunately no community here yet.
Anyone knows more?
Edit: See https://the-eye.eu/redarcs/ and the explanation by r/DataHoarder (linked somewhere below)
I think reusing that data by anyone would be a very shady move. Not everyone who posted on reddit wants their posts and comments to float around in various places without their consent. I know posting online always poses the risk that what you post will be archived somewhere but I still think no one should build any new service on that data.
You are absolutely right. But the data is out there anyways. Reddit keeps copies as much as Google and other creepy spiders. The amount of aggregated and unified knowledge these dump contain is astonishing. For personal research or just preservation.
There are plenty of sites where you can already see old, deleted comments. So barely a new risk.
I’m wondering if that data could be given to archive.org for posterity (if legal of course).
Why not sooner then later, holding out gives reddit hope.
There are a few useful extensions and browser plugins that help automate editing your past comment history and posts to be blank, the same tool then deletes the post and comment for you.
Don’t leave anything behind IMO. I know I did not.
Kind of sad to lose all that knowledge though. I wish we had a backup.
There is, the-eye.eu has a full archive up until march 2023 https://the-eye.eu/redarcs/ (about 2TB total).
You can download individual subreddits too.
See here for more details (reddit unfortunately…): https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1479c7b/historic_reddit_archives_ongoing_archival_effort/
I mean there’s always archive.org and the various other internet caches that contain a large portion of Reddit’s knowledge.
The other significant factor is that even their recently-slashed valuation was based on some degree of projected user growth. If you’re trying to IPO and your growth has flattened, it’s bad bad news. If your engagement numbers are actively moving backwards, that’s catastrophic.
Looking at posts per minute seems like a great way to judge the effect though. I anticipate Reddit, Inc. will attempt to downplay the effect by focusing on numbers that take engagement out of the picture, like Monthly Average Users. If you touch the site once in the month, even by absent-mindedly clicking on a Google result, you’d get counted in that for June. And they wouldn’t report the July numbers until August because, golly it’s an incomplete month. And by then, their hope is that the world will have moved on.
Internally, I’m sure there aware of the impact. But externally, I believe they’ll cherrypick favorable metrics to try and control the narrative for the investing & advertising communities.
I anticipate Reddit, Inc. will attempt to downplay the effect by focusing on numbers that take engagement out of the picture
You pretty much described every corporation in the history of mankind. This is what they always do.
They lost more than 30% of their actual users. Of the remaining traffic a portion is just bots. Maybe 10%? Maybe 30%? No idea, but not all of the remaining traffic is real people.
The test will be if they actually lost the users or just lost them for a few days.
The -30% value is taken from the peak value, but doesn’t look at the total amount posted per day.
So I took the data from the blackout.photon-reddit site source.
It seems that it makes a Reddit Api call every Minute searching the newest Post and Comment and calculates both per Minute rates.
I wanted to see the effect the Blackout had over the day, so I summed the data and plotted it: Seems like between 11th and 12th June the comments/day diminished by -19.2%. The posts/day saw a decline of -8.9%
The sub with the most Activity was probably Askreddit
Very nice work, Post this over at @dataisbeautiful
I deleted my 12 year old account history after the “AMA” with Spez and will be fully deleting my account on the 30th. That being said I clicked back on reddit today and browsed a bit of what was up and after spending the last few days on kbin and beehaw I don’t think I can go back.
The amount of toxicity that I was putting up with on reddit was astounding. I can’t believe I didn’t notice it was so bad, even on the smaller subs I was active in. I always have referred to reddit as a cesspit with islands of good content, but I think the landscape changed while I wasn’t paying attention.
I do hope the protest works and 3rd party devs can continue their wonderful apps, but reddit is kind of over for me regardless. The fediverse somehow feels like the early internet, kinda like going home.
Let’s not have too rose colored glasses. A lot of it is because lemmy and kbin are tiny and haven’t received their “eternal September” moment yet. It’s bound to get worse so I hope our moderation tools will evolve sufficiently until then
While you’re not wrong, the fact that it’s an open and decentralized protocol and not a corporate-controlled silo makes the ultimate outcomes of the fediverse unpredictable. Better for actual human users, I think, and at least it’ll be interesting to watch and participate in while those outcomes develop (likely over years if not decades).
We’ll see. The big problems will arrive when it becomes valuable for spammers
I’m having a similar experience in realising how much toxicity I’ve normalised on reddit. Going back on there now feels so absurd.
Thank you for eloquently putting into words what I’ve been feeling.
The day before the blackout, I was feeling a lot of grief. Reddit had been my “home” for more than a decade, and I thought i would miss the community. Instead, I feel…lighter? Things are much nicer here!
100% more nicer. Les toxic and definitely a feeling of humanity. Hard to explain, but the majority of comments over at reddit just don’t feel human. Needed to change in order to realize.
The fediverse is definitely feeling like the early internet, and it’s really taken me by surprise. Even though I reminisced about it and lamented it’s loss, I think I never really understood just how much I missed it.
It’s like 1995 all over again, and it’s glorious.
That ama was the most unprofessional bunch of dogs shit I have ever seen from the ceo of a multimillion dollar company.
Right there with you, also had a 12 year old account and deleted it. It’s absurd how this is going. Federated definitely feels more tight knit and less just a media consumption platform.
I agree, it definitely was uncomfortable moving from reddit at first, but seeing how familiar the site was, and how much nicer the community is, it feels more like an upgrade than just swapping platforms.
Also, I didn’t expect the protest would have so much of an impact, but I’m all for it!
I’m with you. It really is amazing how much kinder this community is. I love it!
You can feel humans behind these posts. No AI generated content. No toxicity, no “in conclusion” and stupid summaries. Amazing
Only to add some clarification: reddark is only showing you the list of subs that announced they’d go dark versus the amount of those subs that have gone dark.
The exact number is hard to pin down, but reddit claims to have “100k+” active communities.
So 60% of the subs that said they’d go dark are still dark.
Correct. At best estimate that’s 5%of reddit communities but the impact in users might be much larger as a lot of those 100k subs have just 1 or 2 subs
The issue is you lot. I’ve been perusing all these new sites. Everywhere I go I see reddit mentioned and all the comments say exactly the same thing.
I like the protest. “I have visited reddit”
You aren’t protesting if you keep going to it. You are an active users. Your click your ad revenue your engagement is not a protest.
In order to protest do not access the site. No app no website no third party. That hurts them. You can’t protest but keep going on the site.
It’s 3 days. It’s tough. I’ve honestly struggled something stupid. J probably spend about 12 hours on and off reddit. Whenever I get a minute I hope on. First thing in the morning and last thing at night.
This is affirmative strike action. We are on the picket lines.
DO NOT CROSS THE POCKET LINE.
or it’s not a strike
The fact that hundreds of thousands of users - probably the most valuable ones - are not using reddit (actively) for a few a days now is just astonishing. Sure, the amount of aggregated information over there is still huge so no one can be blamed for casually looking for something specific.
But those users here are the ones initiating the engagement, creating the posts and providing valueable and original content. That dropped drastically.
The majority of users only lurk and comment. Or are bots.
Yup. I’ve gone on Reddit a few times in the past couple days, but mostly wound up there due to working on electronics projects and search results from Reddit having the information I needed. The only actual engagement I’ve had with the site has been in the form of comments encouraging people to come over here.
Conversely, I recently posted a massive infodump over on /m/PS2 in order to help kick-start that community.
Keep this shit up! Blackouts won’t mean anything to Huffman if we all come back after 48hrs.
Not hard to keep it up. Nothing dragging me back to reddit. the only thing i am missing is the immense amount of aggregated information
I wish it were easy for me. Just in these last few days from typical searches I do online, reddit is at or near the top of the results list with exactly what I’m looking for.
Where i the issue in casually looking for info? Use an adblocker and reddit doesn’t directly profit. The more the community grows here, the less you’ll lurk over at reddit
Check those stats next month when people can’t use RIF, Appolo, etc.
Been away from Reddit since Monday. I do not mis it.
I have to wonder how much of what’s left is just repost bots and spam bots. I’ve noticed since the blackout and I’ve stopped opening the app much, I’ve gotten a lot more of those stupid onlyfan bots following me.
Well, bots will be shut of as well.
Unless they are Reddit bots.
There are stories (not sure of their truth) of regional subs being started and filled with reposts translated to the regional language - to the point of idioms not making sense when translated.
There are pictures of a while string of comments from different accounts saying “time to dust off my laptop and use the web version I guess” (or something like that).I have absolutely no doubt that Reddit is using paid actors or AI actors to generate/push content/interactions
That allegedly happened recently with some German language subreddit, the admins had prepopulated it with badly translated comments from a bunch of bot accounts they control. I never actually verified that was true and don’t know German to verify, but that’s at least a recent allegation I’ve seen within the past several months that is supposed to be backed by evidence.
Revoking the API really felt like one of those, “pull-up the ladder,” moments. The API access and the choice of 3rd party UI’s it allowed seemed like part of Reddit’s initial community-focused strategy, a method to drive people there from other platforms by being more open and accessible by allowing people to experience it the way they wanted. Then, they stupidly pulled a Digg by revoking that with no way back.
I mean it’s great and all just don’t forget we’re not here purely as anti-redditors, we’re also here to build the new community. Not looking back is the only way to move forward
Thank you for saying this! This post is merely to demonstrate the power of a unified community. The reddit community came together stronger than anyone expected and has ever happened.
I deleted my 10 year old account this morning!
I’ve been slowly using reddit less and less as I’ve been getting accustomed to Lemmy and while it definitely has its problems I’d rather deal with those than let reddit think they can push around the people who make their site even possible to exist
I find it especially funny that the forcibly re-opened r/AdviceAnimals is constantly reminding everyone how douchey Reddit is behaving.
