maybe i'll use the web version for some time, not gonna use their app for sure
I'm not really surprised, I'd actually assume that sexy John Oliver and the other protests created a lot of additional traffic. People post like crazy and a lot of people want to see that, especially since it got some coverage on news sites. Add to that the big majority of people who do not care (remember that 80% of traffic was still reached) plus some who may have been sympathetic enough to join the two day protest but don't care enough to continue to stay away. It's really not surprising that we're back to normal numbers.
Thankfully this isn't the only impact people currently still make, so this isn't over. The real question now will be how else it might change Reddit.
I look up my acct and see my deleted comments and posts being magically revived. Did screen caps of most of it and it is definitely a real thing. Is that a metric for traffic?
Depending on where you live isn't this a violation of our right to privacy? At least in the EU.
I don't think most people understand the protests. I had to explain it to two people who use the platform.
This doesn't surprise me. Most people don't have the time or desire to keep up with tech news, and they just want to feed their addiction. It'll be interesting to see what happens 1~2 weeks after the new API rules are active, and people realize the app they use no longer works.
I never created a Reddit account, and only visited under duress, so I'm not really affected by this. So I'm just cooking up popcorn & watching the show.
My first reaction was one of questioning the statistics.
Then I realized that the way they were generating their stats wouldn’t have counted me for the most part.
Then I realized that I wasn’t really all that unique; most power users wouldn’t have shown up in those stats.
At that point, the stats made more sense.
Oh, man, I'm sure the traffic is up... It took me FOREVER to delete all my comments and posts across 18 accounts. That 5 second lockout on API calls is a total bitch!
Did anybody seriously expect anything different?
There may be some impact, come July, when the third party apps stop working. However, I have to imagine that the vast majority of mobile users use the official app. Quality may take a hit, with the loss of some mods and mod tools, but Reddit will be just fine. Sadly, Reddit rates too highly on content, users, and resultant utility (for many communities) for most users to completely abandon it.
Reddit rates too highly on content
But who provides the content? Power users. Reddit follows the same curve as most social media where only like 1-5% of the users actually post the content, and the rest are consumers. When the content creators are gone, it's just a platform with no content.
The only people who will stick to submitting content are the poor content reposters or various spammers, which the mods have been doing free labor to filter out. Heck, even the bots using the API will die too, so all you'll have is the TOS-breaking bots posting content.
This will not end well when third party apps are gone. I didn't realize it myself, but most of my time is reading Reddit when I'm bored in bed, or on the train, on my phone. I've been a redditor for 17 years, and my time now has mostly shifted from my desktop to the "RIF" Android app, and without that, I'm simply not using Reddit, and have already uninstalled.
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