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Comment by cole-k | Hacker News Reader

I think the changes to Reddit suggest that we (the ones complaining about Reddit) are but a small minority. I really thought Reddit would revert their API changes after seeing the community response, but then... nothing happened. This was the event that made me realize how far I am disconnected from its average user.

OP makes it seem like Reddit's users lose something when Reddit panders to a Marl. But I've observed that the majority of them don't care (enough). Some even like changes we view as invasive. I talked to someone once who told me "Aren't personalized ads so great? I was looking for new shoes, then I see an ad for the perfect shoes. A few clicks and now I have great shoes!" These people exist, and I suspect that they have to exist for ads to generate any revenue.

I do think that it's wrong to paint those who (still) use Reddit/etc. as brainless scroll-zombies, though. They just care about different things.

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I can't say what percentage of Reddit users cared, but I can definitely say that the majority of Reddit participants—the people actually posting the content Reddit is trying to sell—have left. Reddit activity has dropped off a cliff: https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit

Wow, I figured from hearsay that it was unchanged. Thanks for letting me know. I admit to being wrong about most people not caring, at least judging from the numbers you gave.

Geeze, I didn't realise there was such a precipitous drop - I wonder how bad it is for smaller subs.

Are you sure this data is accurate? By the site you reference, r/nottheonion has ~30 comments a day: https://subredditstats.com/r/nottheonion

But if I actually visit the subreddit, I see many posts from within the last 24 hours with 300+ comments each. Is it possible subredditstats.com had some kind of regression in its counting around that time? It could be related to the API changes.

That would make a lot of sense, I wonder if there's a good way to identify activity. Perhaps looking at the # of subscribers/active users that Reddit reports (but I'm not sure if historical data for this is kept).

Wow. Seeing all the top posts / commenters etc all being deleted really drives it home.

I left Reddit after the API changed and Apollo died.

Last week I realized I still kept doing a bunch of reddit searches so I went back and tried the app.

The app is not that bad, hope the users stick around

This is what's been somewhat hard about quitting/boycotting Reddit for me. Ultimately the community comes before the platform and Reddit happened to house a lot of good communities. I admit to breaking my boycott when the only answers I can seem to find for my exact question lie on Reddit. The same goes for my boycott of Stack Overflow, which I have to break even more often due to its ubiquity.

Those people sometimes exist in your own family too. My wife asked me to get rid of pi-hole because the sponsored links at the top of a Google results page no longer worked.

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