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Comment by throwaway4837 | Hacker News Reader

My unpopular theory is that the Reddit blackout increased Reddit usage, having the opposite of the intended effect.

It would certainly change usage patterns. And there are enough popular subreddits who didn't go in on the outage, so there's content to be had.

The adage "there's no such thing as bad press" could definitely apply, given how broadly covered this is (I mean, hell, I saw it show up on NPR).

Currently over 90% of subs are private or restricted.

https://reddark.untone.uk

Re-hosts of that site have the figure even higher.

That is in no way accurate. It says 7806 subreddits, but there are actually over 3 million subreddits, so the figure is actually only 0.24% rather than 90%. It's wonderful what you can do by just faking statistics!

I also don't see some subreddits listed there that are part of the strike.

Like reading a list of war dead. Always remember where you were and what you were doing on that fateful day when r/amateurcumsluts went dark, and the heroic sacrifices made on that hill.

That's my point. It's so highly covered that it might actually bring more people to Reddit today than the number of people who fled. Imagine all of the people who don't use Reddit who saw this press, and visited Reddit because of it. That number may possibly outweigh the number of users who decided not to use Reddit because of the "strike" today.

> there are enough popular subreddits who didn't go in on the outage

Yeah, this morning I noticed only one sub that I follow was actually private. I was going to mention it here, but I forgot which one it was - and now I can't find the one that was blacked out.

That's also my first bet. The strike was well covered in many medias.

Looking at the google trends, it was a big spike today compared to the classic daily workload: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&q=%2...

The US trends are very telling... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%201-d&geo=...

It coincides exactly with when Down Detector shows the Reddit report spike... https://downdetector.com/status/reddit/

I'm gonna go ahead and say my theory is probably right.

This is more indicative of people just searching about reddit, possibly to figure out why the site they normally use is having issues.

It is nice to see all of the toxic subreddits delete themseles.

I operate a certain health condition subreddit. The main subreddit for this condition is highly toxic (which is why I created an alternative a few years ago).

Anyway, it turns out the primary (toxic) subreddit for this condition is taking part in the strike, so a lot of users have come over to my alternative subreddit, and they are glad to have found it because they were getting fed up with the toxicity of the other place.

Unfortunately I'm sure it will be back to normal in a couple of days.

Mind if I drop by? I'm browsing random to find better subreddits.

It's only really of interest to people with that health condition.

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