True… Hornyposters are a whole different beast, seems to me like a separate “community” within reddit who doesn’t really care about other stuff. I’m not a saint, I browse NSFW subreddits as well, but I cannot comprehend why would anybody want to comment under some random nude. The amount of thirsty comments is mind-boggling
Thanks for the info and source. I should have figured. I edited my comment to reflect this, I think we see the long tail effect in action, and just goes to show that every subreddit and community should participate in the protest, no matter how small.
Is this a restriction on bot activity? I guess it would make sense for non-malicious bots using the API, but there’s nothing stopping writing a malicious bot just using the website scraping and automation to post anywhere. At least I never had to fill out a captcha, but there’s possible there are measure against these kind of bots as well.
I got the 90% from here: https://reddark.untone.uk/ - So this site is only listing the subreddits which declared their participation? In that case, I misunderstood the purpose of this site. I thought that this is a mostly complete subreddit list (granted, I have no idea how many subreddits exists on reddit… I’m not sure you can even get a list or scrape them effectively)
How is it possible, that with 90% of subbreddits set to private, the number of posts and comments created on reddit do not decrease according to https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/?
Activity only decreased by 20-30% if I’m being generous looking at the graph. How is this possible, is the graph accurate? How can 10% of subreddits be so active, like nothing happened? That would meanthe remaining 70-80% of activity is happening in 10% of the subreddits which are still open! Which is craaazy.
I have a theory - maybe we are underestimated the amount of bots on the site and they operating like nothing happened in the open subreddits? If this would be the case (and I’m gonna enter speculation and conspiracy territory here), but what if certain parties have quotas to fulfill for advertisers or propaganda machines, so they have to post (using bots or other means)?
I struggle to find the cause of this anomaly, of course you wouldn’t see 1:1 decrease in subbreddits going dark and activity, because people are subscibed to plethora of subbreddits. But I thought that it’ll be at least 50-60% decrease in post activity. Worst case scenario is that these are real users creating real posts and comments, because that would make this protest moot - It would just show reddit management that the community doesn’t matter, general public who come to the site will still interact with the remaining slop, advertisers rejoice.
Very good article, I agree with most of the points.
I also like to think that AI will never replace programmers, because for that to happen, the customer would have to give complete, correct and full requirements and specifications in plain, simple English - we know that almost never happens. Instead, you have to force the requirements out of them with pliers!
Why is that? I’m out of the loop.