Reddit Blackout: -19% Comments/day and -9% Posts/day during the 48h

Most data shown so far looked at the Peak per Minute numbers, so I wanted to see the day data instead.

I took the data from the blackout.photon-reddit site source.

It seems that it makes a Reddit Api call every Minute searching the newest Post and Comment and calculates both per Minute rates.

I wanted to see the effect the Blackout had over the day, so I summed the data and plotted it. Seems like between 11th and 12th June the comments/day diminished by -19.2%. The posts/day saw a decline of -8.9%.

I have also been looking at the Subreddit Stats: Most comments and posts come from r/Askreddit. On 13th June the Sub had 2.4% of the total comments and 0.44% of the total site posts. Sadly I can't see the list of the most commenting and posting subs from reddit before the Blackout because it doesn't seem to work on wayback machine.

But currently it seems like the Top100 commenting Subreddits only make out ~10% (Askreddit: ~1.5%) . So the bulk of the comments happens on the sheer number of other active subreddits.

The subreddit stats site also doesn't show how it gets the data and doesn't make it easy to see historical data overview. During the Blackout there seems to have been post spamming from a now banned german nsfw sub that had even more posts/day than Askreddit

TechnologyClassroom,

I forget where I read this, but something like 15-30% of reddit users third-party apps. 19% dip sounds like some of that group continued using Reddit while a majority either stopped or found Lemmy/Kbin.

Anomandaris,
Anomandaris avatar

Even though you've done some nice work here, I'm reluctant to take those figures, particularly the change percentages, at face value.

There are colossal numbers of bots submitting posts and comments which metrics like this can't identify, which dilutes the real numbers. Of course bots would not be able to post to private subs, but it's less clear how much of the remaining traffic is human and how much is bots posting to empty subreddits as per the dead internet theory.

JanoRis,

yeah you can't distinguish between bots and humans. But like said in the post, currently the top100 commenting subs only take part in ~10% of the total comments. This would fit with the dead internet theory imo.

But it is also important to note that for this info the comments/day numbers come from two different sources, so it is hard to verify the validity.

The comment numbers of the top100 subreddits are from subredditstats.com, while the total is from the script used by blackout.photon-reddit.com

For subredditstats.com there is no way to see how the data is obtained/tracked.

But the blackout.photon site has its source code available. I just have not enough programming experience to tell if the comments/min number is obtained by a direct api call, or if it calculates the comment ID Delta between each call that it does (it calls the most recent comment each minute).

zzmthesurand,
zzmthesurand avatar

It would be interesting to see if subreddits that weren't part of the blackout increased in activity, meaning users who frequented the protest subreddits became more active in other subreddits

JanoRis, (edited )

Snapshot from 4th june

Snapshot from 12th june

Snapshot from Today

Most traffic probably moved to Askreddit. Sadly there is no snapshot from the 13th, since this one would have the data from the 12th. During that time the comments/day peaked to 144k.

Source: https://archive.is/Q2vk3

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