Excerpt:
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.
Well, they did say that about only the 10% of users were the ones who make comments and engage with the communities, and guess what, that 10% did use more likely than not, the third party apps. I’ve been a redditor for more than 16 years with a lot of karma, I deleted all my accounts but one, the oldest I had. I’ve been back for a couple of niche communities but I haven’t commented nor upvoted anything.
Another factor that they probably didn’t consider is that those 10% were, on average, more informed about what was happening and what happened in the past (see spoiler for examples). So for a lot of those people in the 10%, even if they didn’t use the 3PAs (I predict that a lot of them were desktop users), it was the straw breaking the camel’s back - I bet that some people felt outright disgusted for contributing with the profits of a disgusting company like Reddit Inc.
List of examples:
How was Ellen Pao a scapegoat? It’s been a while. Ive been a 13 year redditor somibr pretty much seen everything including the Pao bullshit but I don’t recall her being a scapegoat so much as her saying a lot of stupid stuff.
Then again, it’s been a while
Here’s a link for further info. Accordingly to the previous CEO (Yishan Wong), u/kn0thing forced Pao to fire the communication director Victoria Taylor, also known as the person who organised the AMAs (a big deal for Reddit back then, and largely responsible for its popularity). u/kn0thing eventually admitted to be responsible for firing Taylor, but Pao was the one that took the userbase’s backslash.
And while this is conjecture, I’m led to believe that she was also a scapegoat on creating the precedent for banning subreddits. The userbase hated her, as that was seen as “going too far”, and yet this would become necessary as the site grew (and the subreddits in question were harassing people IRL). Then the following CEO (Huffman) would use and abuse subreddit bans, but since the precedent was already there, users didn’t blame him for that.
TIL!
I remember the Victoria debacle. Seriously WHY did they fire her anyway? Its like… “Here we have liquid gold… Lets throw it in the trash!” but I thought that Pao was responsible for that, yeah.
I haven’t used app and accessed via browser. Reason why i left was arrogance of the management and it help me realize that reddit became time-waster for me. Quality of discussion was often poor, softly said.
I kept my ancient account as well, but I did remove all my posts and comments.
Lurking is fine. It just uses their server resources and doesn’t give them much value
They live of ads so they benefit from lurking as well.