My favorite thing over there right now is r/videos, which only allows text descriptions of the video you were going to post. It’s way more entertaining than it has any right to be.

Ugh that reminds me of trying to talk to a Replika. “I have a gift for you!” “Great, what is it?” “(Hands you a box)” “…cool so what’s inside the box?” “Wouldn’t you like to know!” “Umm. Yes. Yes I would like to know what’s in the box you just gave me.” …and so on and so forth until I rage-quit the app. 😆

I see a lot of people saying, “I can’t believe it was only a 3% drop,” and I’d like to offer some context as to why there’s not enough data here to really tell a story, yet. It could go a few different ways.

The Reddit protests in June were a big deal, not just on Reddit or Lemmy, but to the media at-large. Traffic surely saw a huge influx of people wanting to look at the dumpster fire. I know that I myself used Reddit a lot leading up to the blackouts, since it was, in a sense, the last hurrah of Reddit as we knew it. The Spez AMA would have driven traffic. The NSFW sub protests would have driven traffic. All those news articles linked to Reddit directly, and they would have also driven traffic.

Even with all that, there’s still a decrease in traffic. As others have said, July will be a better metric for the actual damage done, since the media has largely moved on and aren’t driving as many visits, and 3PAs are toast.

These numbers would have been more representative if we could have had more than a quarter to look at. What was the QoQ trajectory before this? For all we know, this could have indicated business as usual, or it could have indicated something much bigger, depending on what the traffic metrics over the past 12-24 months could show us.

I also would have liked to see the history for unique sessions and unique visitors. If there was a huge influx of unique visitors compared to the past few months, but traffic was still decreased overall, then that would indicate it came from news clicks or bots.

Basically what I’m saying is that the data doesn’t paint any kind of real picture right at this moment. That doesn’t mean there was no impact though. Time will tell.

Unfortunately r/videos is only allowing text based descriptions of videos at this time, so you’ll have to describe it in excruciating detail.

(Srsly tho the illegal upload of Bee Movie was a thrilling read.)

Whaaat I didn’t even know this was a thing that could happen!!