It doesn't help that they are using facebook-like tactics to try and force/coerce you to download and use their app. I recently was trying to find help getting through a difficult part of a game. Reddit seemed to be where most of the good user discussions were at. Reddit's mobile page would give me a pop-up stating that this community was not "trusted" and that I need to view on the app or go to the Reddit front page. There was no option to ignore. Trying to close the pop-up would just send me to the front page. Luckily, I know about old.reddit. That's going to go away eventually though.

Tbh I think the vast majority of people that use these sites are just there to mindlessly scroll. I do imagine a lot of their reactions to the protests was to be pissed at the weird basement dwellers disrupting their porn/aww/etc feeds

More than anything, the fact that Reddit absolutely quadruple-downed on steering people to their garbage app at the same time probably drove a lot of that crowd away. I regard it like ~~Twitter~~ X now: just another rotting, closed-off corporate theme park - and I refuse to believe any content I hit a login wall after getting linked to is important enough to deal with their shit.

So how much of the use today is from bots? I imagine that percent went significantly up.

Whatever you do, don't go back, as it's only the dregs of society left there. Honestly, it's horrible on there now. I permanently left it yesterday.

Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.

No doubt, both Redfit and Twitter use has nosedived. But, using reduced posting as an indicator of reduced active users presumes users have any say in what is promoted in a subreddit. And that's obviously wrong. Reddit is compromised through and through. Worse than Digg ever was.

No, let's also consider that there's much less content available to submit. Partly because of Google and SEO games. But also because news organizations have paywalled and Reddit chose to kill blogs by naming everything blog related to be bligspam. Back when there were serious writers writing blogs. This only benefitted the guys who paywall now.

Which means there's a lot less original content to submit. And no, LLM created nonsense doesn't count.

Shocker, the troll who said Elon Musk was a genius and has sex with an orange cat with silicone implants on the side was wrong??

I’m not surprised. The user interface for mobile has just gotten awful, and losing third party apps was the last nail in the coffin for me. Within a day I couldn’t stand the official app and went to other sites.

Hey, at least the attention whoring subs are getting a lot of frontpage time XD

Like the "amiugly" and all its variants, which I didn't even know existed until after the fiasco pushed them to get on the r/all frontpage.

Shame Reddit took such a nosedive. It's a good reminder that no good thing last forever when an IPO is announced and it's time to squeeze every last dollar out

It's only hard for me to keep up with sports discussion without reddit but whatever.

Was there an up to date register of best alternatives per each subreddit?

I'd say it goes deeper than that. the lack of a proper mobile app has definitely decreased my presence on reddit. but there's more.

i do visit some 'niche' subreddits about once a day from my desktop (hurrah for old.reddit), and i once went to popular+hot -- it was utter rubbish. being here and on mastodon has opened my eyes on how severely the general content on reddit has deteriorated.