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Comment by Phiwise_ | Hacker News Reader

A favorite more recent fact about this of mine: You might have heard about reddit's several early influxes from other websites as metaphorical eternal septembers, but did you know they had a literal eternal september just over a year after the release of the official mobile app? Check out the inflection point: https://subredditstats.com/r/teenagers

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Since the blackouts last year and the recent IPO, it feels like astroturfing and spam have increased on Reddit, while quality contributions have decreased. All usage metrics are up according to Reddit's IPO filings, but it feels like engagement is actually down, or at least lower quality. Many niche subs feel like ghost towns now.

Is this just my subjective impression or do you feel the same?

(anecdata for n=1:) Everyone I personally know who contributed meaningfully to subs I was active in has moved on to other sites. What used to be places sprawling with activity are still places sprawling with activity… but it’s mostly reduced to reposts and posturing and especially posting photos of the thing you bought (I guess consumers can’t do much more). This has been a trend before the blackouts but it feels like those mark the point where it all broke down.

This is indeed a N=1

Many of us who were writing all the decent comments there left after they made clear they want it to be another bland nothing of a website during the blackouts. A hundred dull image macros a day aren't worth wading through for the few nuggets of decent content, so loads more left or majorly cut back. Some communities such as javascript are now dead.

The second thing I noticed was the comments and posts per day cratering recently. Is that real?

If you're referring to the sharp drop at the end of the graph, no. It's an artifact of the api change making it much harder to capture comments. We can verify this by how the comments/day rank didn't budge, because it happened on literally every sub simultaneously. If you're referring to the gradual dip from its peak, I have no idea.

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