Ask HN: Anyone at Reddit can confirm a traffic dip?
Looks like Reddit has gone dark. I logged out and deleted the apps. How are things internally?
Unfortunately there’s enough interesting content that I’m not sure average people will even notice or care. And it’s painful to say that.
By “interesting” I mean interesting to the masses. /r/AITAH, /r/iamatotalpieceofshit, /r/therewasanattempt, /r/news… the list goes on.
Part of Reddit’s strength is that even with only a handful of subs, it still surfaces the most interesting content from those subs. The net effect is that people who aren’t a member of a community gone dark won’t really be affected.
At least they’ll see it, though. I had to scroll past many posts about the blackout, which isn’t nothing.
I gotta say my home view and my popular view are obviously impacted by the protest. I think nearly all of the subreddits I subscribe to participated, so all I see is content in the subreddits I moderate (which are also shut down). Popular looks old & stale to me, so I turned off my filtering... which revealed a bunch of stuff I don't care about.
For me this is turning into a meditation about how new users are frequently impervious to the messages and signs intended to help them and instead often want a real person to spoon feed them the content of those messages and signs. In the future I'd really like improve the experience of new users but I am not sure how to politely encourage them to engage their brains.
Some subs that didn't go completely dark are understandable, like /r/outoftheloop and /r/explainlikeimfive which have gone read-only so that readers can ask and get explanations of what's up.
But there are some surprising ones, like /r/programming. Maybe because it was created by /u/spez? Somewhat interestingly, he's also a mod of /r/outoftheloop.
If those subreddits were to die off definitively I’d probably still go on reddit.
Let them have Reddit, we can do better.
The anticipation of traffic coming back would have me on edge.
Maybe everything expires from caches and new traffic comes in on cold caches and slams databases with requests causing the databases to slow down making them unable to handle any traffic...
As an ops person the only time I have ever thought "It's going very well" is when something I expected to cause an outage didn't or a new automation seems to be working properly.
Everything else is change and failure is proportional to change. 5000 subreddits going dark is definitely change, and I would definitely be anxious about the uncharted territory, not happy to see low load on the servers.
I think I would be worried about these people who are downloading their post histories, deleting their post histories, or potentially mass deletion of accounts. Requests against old posts and uncached content could potentially be expensive. Of course, without a deep understanding of Reddit's infra/architecture, it's hard to really estimate what kind of problems might arise.
Remember we're talking about a company that can't even make a functioning text input in their new UI.
If the ui code is bugged, the sre team will still get that delivered it to your web browser.
Then again, there’s also: https://www.collectgbstamps.co.uk/explore/issues/?issue=2275...
This is a big flaw in Reddit's algorithm if you ask me. On your feed, small subs get crowded out by large ones, despite the fact that you may be more interested in the small sub.
It doesn't seem very hard to improve. They could use the click rate or upvote rate to weigh the interest of each sub as well as normalize how many upvotes an item got based on the average upvotes an item gets within a particular sub.
it's just not enough to outweight very regular, very popular content from the mega-subs. And more threads in popular subs increases the chance of something going viral. How often does something from r/zfs catch fire, really catch fire? Not that much. Even if that's only 100 upvotes for a smaller sub, it just doesn't happen that much. Smaller subs are generally closer to their average, they go viral less.
Frankly maybe 5 years ago I blocked Gallowboob and filtered a lot of the larger content-churn subreddits and it's dramatically improved the overall experience. There is (or was) still plenty of content in r/popular and the frontpage.
Like, where exactly?
I, for one, don't plan on getting back onto Reddit, i've deleted the official app and keep Apollo around for as long as it is still working.
Love the protest and i really hope Reddit leadership gets the message, but IMHO the bridges are burnt and Reddit itself is too - even if they, somehow, reverse course - i'd rather have communities moving elsewhere than going dark for like 2 days and then return to business as usual...
[1] https://reddark.rewby.archivete.am/ for example
Servers timing out, error messages on the user's screens, overload, flashing lights and on-call PagerDuty alarms going off would indeed be an example of chaos.
Finding volunteers you can trust though...
An audience that big + lack of morals + power = chance to make money by manipulating what gets through.
As a user of RIF I will be very sad when they shut-down. I'm hoping there's some alternative platform I can spend time on, but it's hard to see myself fully leaving Reddit given the sheer utility of it from an information stand-point.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/14/discord-forum-channels/
If they were clever they would've done some guerilla marketing to get people onto their platform off reddit...
It was already happening "organically". Every single gaming subreddit had a discord as well. When they announced the blackouts, they left a "see you on discord" message. It's sad because I don't really like discord, it's a blackhole of information. With Reddit you could google and find things, unfortunately nothing gets indexed on Discord by google. So to find anything useful you need to join a discord "server" (not really a server) and use their search (which isn't great).
Much smaller userbase and it will probably never grow _big_ (because federation is too daunting for some), but for me that's a plus. It's a bit like HN: sometimes it's good to _not_ become mainstream (e.g. by having a design that scares away people).
Not that I can effectively even read those tweets now that the third-party apps are killed.
*yeah, I have a twitter account. It's the only point of contact with some companies. I may use it a couple of times a year max.
But now there doesn't seem to be any.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4313644
The comment by brackin predicting 9gag becoming a (Buzzfeed-style?) media company with “9GAG Magazine, the book and TV shows” is pretty bonkers, as well as the appearance of- moot???
The automatic moderation tools are hilariously bad, that's why people are using the API for 3rd party tools.
Let's see how this develops.
That's going to be difficult or expensive (basically making it pointless), 6500+ subs have gone dark.
Almost 400 1+ million subs are participating.
Total is ~28200 moderators
5 moderators control 92 of the top 500 subs. That cuts both ways.
There are a lot of mods lower on the totem pole but it's a handful of people making the call to shut reddit down, and it wouldn't be that costly to kick them out, put an admin at the top, and open the subs again.
Once you've pried the big ones back open... who cares if r/warhammer wants to stay closed? You don't need to take over every little niche hobby sub, as long as the big tiktok-style content-drip subs get back running.
That's the future of Reddit, in Reddit's eyes. Tiktok 2.0. That's where the shareholder value is, they don't give a shit about your niche hobby sub with 10k users being closed.
Even if the lower-ranked mods don't want to mod anymore, you will always find some schmuck who wants to push buttons at people. People can't resist it even here on HN, people love flagging/downvoting. What's the least amount of power that can go to someone's head? Internet forums moderator, most definitely. There will always be an endless stream of people willing to do it for the tiny bit of clout it affords them.
> (basically making it pointless),
saving the business isn't really pointless for reddit. They have procedures to replace mods after 48 hours and we very well might see them deploy them.
They've made it clear they understand the frustration and where people are coming from and they don't care. In fact they are actually doubling down on fucking up the web experience for mobile etc to push people to the native app on those platforms.
She's not that into you, bro.
Remember, this is Reddit... they bought Dubsmash, with a 25% market penetration in the black teen community, killed the platform/app, and turned it into a subreddit with 1.5k subscribers, a conversion rate of around 0.01%. They don't mind doing big Twitter-style changes that risk losing a lot of users even if the conversion rate is abysmal.
People are approaching this from the perspective of "what would I, a rational person do, to preserve the Reddit I know and love?" and not Reddit's perspective of pivoting the business to being Tiktok 2.0. In their (probably correct) assessment, that pivot evidently requires people being on the native app/new experience.
The hobby stuff is fine especially if it draws in users but it's not where the money is for them. They need advertiser $.
Where the hell did this come from?
https://www.google.com/search?q=She's+not+that+into+you%2C+b...
"Reddit doesn't care about hobbyists as long as they get eyeballs scrolling their tiktok content" just isn't as catchy.
Anyway, that's the case here. There are a lot of people who are very emotionally attached to their posting, and it's a personal disaster for them to lose that. It is not, however, a disaster to Reddit - you can clearly see from the Q+A that Spez gets how upset people are and just doesn't care, they still will not change course and are even doubling down on killing the mobile website etc to further drive traffic to the native app. Very clearly they are making the decision that it's better to retain 75% or even 50% of their users and get them all on the app than to maintain the existing experience and not monetize the users effectively.
In this vein I 100% expect them to crack open any subreddits still closed after 48 hours and get the money moving again. Most people will come back. Or at least Reddit thinks most people will come back.
But generally, people value the content of their posting quite highly, because of the emotional connection. It's like a pawnshop, to you they're priceless heirlooms, to the guy behind the counter it's junk. It doesn't matter to Spez if you keep posting or not, and in the aggregate the odds are that you will.
And that's the emotional disconnect, users see a community they built and don't want to change or go away, and Spez sees a big 'ol cash pinata if he can turn it into Reddit-Shaped Tiktok. People feel they built something and contributed something value, and Spez feels that there are more cat-picture-uploaders and movie-quote-comment-chain posters where you came from. Your posts aren't an heirloom to him, they're junk.
Redditors think Spez can’t live without them - and he’s just not that into you. Making a big dramatic ultimatum is not gonna work.
This is Ycombinator we're posting on, and Spez/Reddit are the very first, the model YC alum. They're chasing money, not building a community, they don't care about you the way you care about them.
It sucks to get dumped but it’s over, and people are just making a scene because they can. At some point Reddit will get tired of it and call the cops (insert mods/reopen subreddits) and move on with their life.
If anyone else is interested I made a browser extension you can use to batch delete your Reddit posts and comments: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-delete-reddit...
Let me know how it works for you if you try it! Still fixing bugs.
The worst is that reddit search is so bad that they make it impossible to find an alternative subreddit. I disagree with the whole "strike" idea, but reddit is really a terribly terribly ran website
I don’t even understand the issue in the first place, you can either use the official app for free with ads, or use a third party app for something like $2 a month.
There have already been multiple analysis done that no 3rd party client can survive this given the new pricing for the API. $2 a month won't cut it.
There were many options Reddit had to improve its API, define a contract with API callers, etc. but, Reddit didn't do enough.
So, yes ~$2-3/user/month. The 3p app has to charge the user and then pay reddit. In the case of Apollo, it is to the tune of $20M a year. Apollo (the app) is developed by 1 person and so are most other 3p apps. Suddenly (with months notice) they are going to be billed millions.
Even after the user pays to use a 3p app, they cannot access any NSFW content through it.
This isn't a case of opportunity cost or lost revenue, reddit simply wants 3p apps gone.
/u/spez doesn't want my money, he wants to drive out 3rd party clients so he can (try to) make even more money by limiting and controlling the ways people can use the site.