this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023

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Data is Beautiful

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Reddit Activity 08 - 28 June [OC] (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

37 comments fedilink hide all child comments

During the Reddit Blackout i made a graph showing the posts and comments/day (Link).

Some days ago i was asked to make an Update so here it is.

Source Data is from here and contains the same Data as some may know from here. Only difference is that the post and comment count is summed over the day.

EDIT:

The Original Post Data contained inconsistent Data points on each day (see here).

This is the corrected Chart, which uses the difference in Post IDs between the days to calculate the daily number (adjusted to s between the api calls):

I also adjusted the values to 10^6 and adjusted the y-axis ranges, I hope this makes it easier on the eyes.

For people complaining on the mixed chart: Double column looks bad with 2Y-Axis, and double lines looks too empty. 2Y-Axis are necessary cause of the difference in scaling of the posts and comments data, only other option would be an axis break.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Be interesting to see what happens between this period and over the next month. I made the switch today and I'm sure many more are doing also.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Same with me - just joined a few hours ago! It would be great to see a viable community-run alternative to Reddit and other online services.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Welcome! :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Especially when 3rd party apps stop working.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Too many of my favourite communities are still yet to make a switch, but I sure as hell hope they do! r/crowbro would make an excellent addition to lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yea i wonder if it does happen how much of a panic reddit is gonna be in, cos it cant reflect positively on their IPO. I hope they get screwed

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Wow, I’m surprised that there wasn’t a bigger dip during the blackout. This shows how mainstream Reddit has become, and there’s a lot of momentum for people to stay there. But we don’t need to get hundreds of millions over to Fedi, just enough to have quality discussions. I’m more interested in seeing the continuation of the growth curves for Lemmy and others!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I'm curious to see what happens when the 3rd party apps shut down. Most people I know that use them are just waiting on them to shut down before they change their habits.

Also, it's not going to change overnight. I suspect the quality of Lemmy/Kbin will keep rising while the quality of Reddit keeps declining. This will gradually shift where people go for their link aggregations.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Though, I do kinda like the way it is rn. I mean, I hope for more communities & content someday. But, the vibe here is so calm & courteous atm. Like the best & kindest ppl are here now.

Idk.. I like all you guys, ig. Lol. It's just nice rn 😌

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Agreed! Everyone is chill here, it’s not just a bunch of karma whores, bots, and assholes dominating everything.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It's so chill. The askKbin threads are full of such honest answers at the moment, not something trying to always be a joke or make a pun.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

A vast majority of my posts on Reddit about their decision to remove 3rdPA was met with a "who cares?!"-type of response.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Exactly, I miss some of the smaller communities here but I don't miss having subreddits with hundreds of thousands of people. Besides, reddit is only going to get worse, if the fediverse continues to get better eventually people will move over. It's a marathon, not a sprint.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hi, I'm the creator of the blackout tracker. I have a question, which I'm too lazy to verify myself. To get the total number of posts/comments per day, did you sum up all the data points perMinute values over the day or did you take the difference between the first and last ID of the day? If you went for the first option, did you account for the time between each post? Because the time between each data point can vary, since I stopped and restarted the server multiple times, during which no data was collected. Also if you look at the time frame on blackout.photon-reddit.com the peaks and lows over the 2 days visually looks a lot lower than in your graph.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hi, thanks for your work and good point.

It is as you said, I am just summing the data since I don't know the Post and Comment Id format and how to convert it into a number. Is it Base64?

Here an Overview over your coverage though:

I guess this explains the higher number on the 8-9th. There seems to be a timeframe with 30 second pull intervalls on these days

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Almost, it's base 36. I'm using these functions for converting them. The ID is incremented for each new post/comment. So the difference between the last and first post ID of a day, is the total number of posts on that day. In that coverage you can see pretty well the 2 days where my internet was struggling and when I switched to cloud hosting.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks, I adjusted the counting using the ID now.

Is it ok if I make another Update using your source data next week? Or are you gonna stop the tracker on the 1st July cause of the API changes? If I am not mistaken it shouldn't get hit by the changes since the API calls are too low right?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah that looks more like it.
You can make however many posts you want :)
I will keep it running for at least a week or two after July 1st, then I'll have to see, because the subreddit related data is growing quite quickly (300MB) and the per minute chart is quite dense now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Perfect thanks :)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Probably worth considering that the (admittedly subjective and difficult to measure) quality of those posts and comments has likely taken a big dive.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It's purely subjective but I've seen a noticeable increase in bot prevalence. My lurker account has recently had multiple porn bots suddenly start to follow it which has never happened before.

What I wouldn't give to have stats on what % of the active Reddit community is actually organic vs bot.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

The Twitter parallels continue.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I wonder if Reddit is setting thousands of bots loose to keep the activity high so their IPO looks better or something? I don't know how any of this works but something like that wouldn't surprise me.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wait, reddit has a follow feature? Who'd use that nonsense?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It had a follow feature since at least 2012, maybe earlier than that. Miami redditors used to have a lot of meetups and we thought it would be fun to follow each other to see what we were commenting on and what subreddit everyone frequented, but since you couldn't see who was following you (at the time) it felt too much like stalking each other when we would bring up each other's comments each week, so we all stopped. But when someone you were following commented somewhere you were reading, it showed a special icon. Now they've made it more like Twitter where you have a profile page and a feed and they notify you when someone follows you, but it's all porn bots.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Going through your source you are hitting

commentsPerMinute.json for comment counts

As part of your reddit api pull, what reason do you believe this information is accurate and not falsified?
It would be very easy to do so.

https://github.com/ArthurHeitmann/reddit_site_stats/blob/9e70f7195339d00f0bd49e252a7ca3fe829da5f2/src/missions/CommentsPerMinuteLoggerMission.ts

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Replying through my kbin since i can't reply to kbin from lemmy.world right now for a reason:

It's not actually my reddit api pull. As far as I understand the code, in a regular time intervall the newest post and comment are pulled to obtain the per minute data.
Not sure if that info is directly obtained from the reddit api, or if they use a comment/post ID to calculate the difference between each sampling point. Am not that good at coding myself.

But yeah i think that reddit could manipulate that data without issues.

There are some paying traffic monitoring sites that apparently showed a dip of 20% too (Reported here). They also report that the average time spent and session counts went down by 14% and 8%. Since this data is not obtained from reddit directly I think it might be a bit more representative

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Nice to know that the posts per day are staying lower than they were. Fuck em

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Anyone notice that comments and posts are almost at the same level on Wednesday? Very suspicious, I think spez has really been pumping up bot activity just to give the appearance of not bleeding users.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So basically, u/Spez was right and people really are addicts. Shame, but not entirely unexpected.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I am sadly missing data reaching further back for any real comparison. It seems that Monday and Tuesday always has the highest activity, so the Blackout Effect should actually be compared to those timepoints the week before. Comparing the Thursdays for example, you still see that we haven't reached the same activity as the week before the blackout.

But all this is just assumptions without several historic data points of the weeks before the Blackout.

I do think a huge amount of content is bot generated on the site though and I wouldn't be surprised if spez also used ghost accounts to generate content like they admitted doing when reddit was created. Website tracker sites already said they saw a big decline in amounts and duration of user interactions of the site. Also the different protest forms did have some advertisements getting paused which is a big deal for the site. Will be interesting to see how the site value change will develop in the coming weeks and if user activity will stabilise back to normal levels or not

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