I’ve been back on Reddit three times since the blackout started, and those three times were trying to find where my normal Reddit communities went (thus ending up here)
I’ll miss how simple it all was, but won’t be going back
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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The APIs go dark on July 1. Those are the traffic numbers I'm waiting to see. The protest/Blackout was a warning shot: July 1 will see the real exodus.
Yeah, I'm still occasionally using Reddit, but once the third-party app I use stops working, I'm done.
Will just login once on my PC to purge, and delete my account.
Most of my reddit browsing is on my phone during downtime. When they kill 3rd party apps and I have to deal with ads and a subpar user experience I'm out.
I cannot comprehend all the anti-protest people on reddit who are actively cheering on the death of 3rd party apps, like they actually WANT to see ads. I imagine many of these people are hypocrites and are using adblock on their desktops anyway.
shows you how good this protest is going
I mean - it was a ~6% drop...Most of which is probably back by now. The visit duration was a decently significant drop at about 10%, but that will surely return to normal as more subreddits open back up. I doubt reddit is going anywhere, or will even make any substantial changes resulting from the protest.
Overall, I'm unlikely to go back. Not necessarily to hurt reddit or anything, but because fediverse alternatives seem pretty reasonable without ads that will be forced on users now that reddit third party API calls are basically gutted. The infrastructure is here to make something good. Hopefully the turnout will stick around and increase beyond the initial influx of users from the protest. I will say that, of the various "exodus" episodes of reddit's lifetime, this seems more impactful. I think mainly due to the alternatives actually being present. Earlier attempts at exodus fell short because there was simply nothing similar out there.
IDK, I think there are enough people, like me, that just left, and didn't go back (at least intentionally) after the 11th. Then there are the casual users that have left/reduced usage because of the bullshit (see all the malicious compliance and blackouts) to other similar sites like tiktok or meta that they can get their dopamine from.
The numbers I have seen have been daily users, and engagement time. I'm curious to see, a week out, what those numbers look like. I can say that I accidentally logged in a few times on the 12th. Either muscle memory, or clicking a link, not realizing it was going to reddit. Those two things count toward daily users AFAIK, and I know I'm not the only one (I think the numbers are inflated because of that). I also think that 8 min average (or whatever it was) will plummet as the bigger users (like me, or the mods) stop going there.
We also haven't see what happens when the 3rd party apps shut down. I feel like even more of the casual users will leave, to avoid ads, and the bigger users, that see Apollo as reddit will stop altogether. Then, with the mods, core users, contributors split/gone it'll be even more overrun with spam/porn bots. The user experience will continue to do what all the rest of the social medias have already done before them.
All that is to say, I agree that Reddit isn't going away, like facebook hasn't gone away, BUT I think this whole thing has done a lot more damage to reddit than a lot of people seem to realize. And I think once we get into July, we will see the real toll it's taken. The longer the fight goes on, and the more maliciously compliant people get, the more it's going to hurt reddit.
There will probably be a second drop when the API changes come into effect and the 3rd party apps stop working, since people will literally not be able to browse on their apps.
A lot of companies have profit margins in the 10% range. A 15% drop in revenue could result in immediate loss of profitability.
For a company looking to make an IPO, this data does not look good at all. Especially because it was completely avoidable, they could have avoided this whole thing by just responding to developer concerns and just delaying the launch of fees for 6 months to allow devs to reduce calls and change their own monetization strategy. They could have avoided the worst of it by just not being total dickheads to literally everyone, getting caught in a lie and then doubling down on it and lying more.
May it ever continue.
Not surprising.