this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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When reddit shut down their api every single subreddit on the site went down in comment activity by 75% or more. Comment activity has only been decreasing in the month since then. Post activity has been in decline as well.
Whether this means people stopped using the site entirely or not is up for debate. But in terms of damage to the community on the site it is the single biggest social media failure I have seen on the web since Digg. Even Musk hasn't damaged Twitter as much as the api change has damaged reddit.
Wow. Where did you get those numbers, would love to peruse
https://subredditstats.com
Go to literally any subreddit, scroll to the comments per day graph and check out the drop on July 11th. The official date of the change was July 1st but they delayed it or something with a grace period. That drop on July 11th is the api drop.
Some examples in order - /r/mildlyinfuriating /r/whitepeopletwitter /r/gaming /r/Askreddit
Hahaha wow. Thanks
What is happening over there is one of the biggest disasters I've ever seen online and the fact that it's going unreported on while Twitter and Musk continue to get all the attention is absolutely ridiculous. Reddit is collapsing and unless they do something enormous it is currently in a death spiral.
where will all the nazis go!?
Twitter by the looks of things.
Holy shit. I'll be honest, having quit using reddit for daily browsing and simply relegating it to its main productive purpose of "usable Google results," I kind of assumed that the outrage over the API pricing ultimately didn't have much of an effect. But this data is nuts. I guess it goes to show the effect that alienating power users can have on a site that's so power-user driven, where a fraction of users even comment and a tiny fraction of that fraction posts content and an even tinier fraction of that tiny fraction moderates to keep things running smoothly.
Just recently updated on this, reddit are actively trying to do something about it but are still in the "oh fuck what do we do?" stage of gathering information. https://hexbear.net/comment/3946548
I don't think this is all just alienating power users. I think a major aspect of this is disturbing routines that people previously had. When people have a daily routine where they do the same thing every single day you shouldn't disturb that because then they replace that part of their routine with something else, that's what users did with reddit imo when their preferred app no longer worked. They just used something else, probably Tiktok.