Just in case anyone here was wondering how Reddit's numbers are looking these days...
Data and visuals from https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit
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Did the actual comments fall or did the tool get hit by the API change?
That depends on how it's written. The fact that it's not showing zero completely makes me think they'd been iterating over threads counting comments, and they're hitting API limits. But that's just a blind guess without having looked at their source code.
If that were the case, itd be a pretty sharp ceiling not a noisy one
If they’re only able to get the comment counts for a smaller number of threads, those individual numbers would be noisy but lower.
For example, before they got 100 threads with counts ranging from 0-100. Now they only get 10 threads with the same range of counts.
Yes but then what? When you hit the API limit you're fucking done... There should be big gaps every time this scenario triggers unless what, they have api keys for each sub or something lol
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16160319875092-Reddit-Data-API-Wiki
so maybe it's not that bad, depending on what the scheduler looks like but that would slow the entire tool down considerably if they have to wait many minutes each time after hitting a rate limit, which as you say wouldn't take long with bigger comment sections
There is a big fat warning at the top of the page saying that the data is out of date, or innacurate due to the api changes
Funny enough, if it is an API problem, then this is one of the scenarios that a scrapper could easily solve the issue and grant accurate results again. A playwright script written by ChatGTP could do it.
I read reddit with a client that uses a scrapper now. The fuck is reddit gonna do, block Chromium? They said they wanted to stop this, well, congrats, they started it instead.
ReVanced can patch most of the popular apps with your own private (free to use) API key.
Step by step guide if you're interested
I'm sure Reddit is seeing private key usage sky rocketing on their end since ReVanced released these patches. Whether or not Reddit chooses to do anything about it remains to be seen, but I can't help but wonder how long it will last.
Nowadays I still stick with Lemmy for general scrolling and only go to Reddit for my niche subreddits that don't have active equivalents here.
Yes, a big factor, many users gradually left the site after the API changed. Also the sub mods have become increasingly ban-happy in the recent years.
While you may be correct, I think op was referring to the the tool that counts the comments for this chart.
It maybe used the APIs to count comments and that's why the sudden drop in the comments count. It just can't count them as reliably anymore.
But it's just a guess.
The admins are banning anyone whi questions a mod these days, assuming they're not puppets of them in the first place. Any sembalence of a distinction between mods and admins is gone
Subredditstats logs about 1/4 of the comments posted on a given subreddit. Pick any small subreddit and check its comments to verify for yourself. Takes about a minute. 25 comments/page. Old.reddit.com/r/____/comments
A bit of both I imagine.