I decided to check the front page (as in /r/popular, what people see by default) out of morbid curiosity since most of Reddit has gone dark now, and honestly it’s like nothing has changed for the casual user.

The biggest subs with the most traffic haven’t gone dark at all, and all the same posts and popular stuff still fill the front page, so for many people I suspect they’re not even going to feel this, but maybe it’s a bit too premature to be making this conclusion, let’s see what happens.

EDIT: I was somewhat premature with this post, even /r/popular is pretty barren as things move nowhere near as fast. That being said, it's disappointing to see how much is still open, and how some subreddits (such as /r/pcmasterrace) are clearly missing the point by allowing "certain posts".

[–] lawliot@beehaw.org 30 points 1 year ago

I just checked all and popular, the top posts are all about the blackout. It did feel a bit empty, which is good.

[–] b0b89@midwest.social 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have multiple reddit accounts and on one my front page was literally blank so it depends on what subs you look at

[–] oryx@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Mine isn't empty, but it's very different from normal. Still lots of stuff with lots of upvotes, but it's just so off. If I didn't know about the blackout stuff, I would've noticed something was up still.

[–] topperharlie@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

IDK, seems quite dessert in my end. From my subscriptions most are gone (except vim, vulkan, accidentalgimbli and some very small ones, shame on them) and the front page (edit: r/popular) looks very empty too, with very little posts (many of them from "not too nice" communities anyway, like there was an attempt, publicfreakout and such, which is kind of on brand)

[–] matt@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I suspect curated lists will definitely feel a huge impact, but if I had to guess (and I may be wrong), most traffic comes from browsing the default front page (/r/popular). There isn't quite as much content, but there's still definitely a lot of the same stuff still around.

I could just be too early of course, as many are still in the process of shutting down and people haven't gotten off Reddit yet.

[–] topperharlie@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

hmmm... are we checking the same page r/popular? normally there is a new post every X minutes and now in the main page there are several >8h posts... I think is definitely noticeable and obvious (not to mention the three posts with information about the protest on very popular subreddits)

maybe you were expecting an empty page? that will never happen, if that would happen reddit admins would reopen subs or even upload random memes to new subs to make it "not empty"

or maybe reddit has local content and we are seeing different r/popular, I'm in Europe

[–] matt@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I browse through a privacy frontend (libreddit), but I've never really seen new posts constantly on /r/popular, usually after maybe 30 minutes to an hour.

I definitely wasn't expecting an empty page, but I was expecting it to be... different, but it isn't really, it's just all the same memes / politics posts that I'm used to seeing.

[–] topperharlie@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

to be fair, when I say minutes I meant that I used to check out r/popular several times a day, not every minute, so 30 mins is perfectly possible. Normally I used to see "new content" every time, and quite a few posts, today doesn't seem to "move" that much, although I haven't make a very thorough study, I just woke up 1h ago and checked twice after reading your comments.

Also, most of it is super old (>8h) and the content is quite different, normally there are a lot of "everything" ("good" and "bad"), but today seems like everything is in the "negative" side (AITA, wcgw, dankmemes...) and some other subs that I have never seen. (quoting here since good and bad is very subjective)

But we may have different perceptions and that is fine.

[–] matt@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

I think you're right, it's been a couple of hours now and nothing has moved, I've also gone into some of the reddits still open and they're all restricted, so really there's no content.

I jumped the gun a bit there, now it's time to try and avoid the site indefinitely.

[–] bstix@feddit.dk 9 points 1 year ago

same posts and popular stuff

I don't know if you've noticed, but all the top post from today and yesterday are reposts of previous top posts. More so than usual. I might have tightened my tinfoil a bit too much, but it think the Reddit staff is busy posting popular posts to make it appear alive to oblivious and new users.