This is true. But we are also up in terms of page views per month, unique visitors, etc., etc. reddit has probably been getting gradually bigger each year for as long as I can remember, and it doesn’t look like that trend has peaked off yet. At least not the subs I have access to.
Yes, still. I’m a mod on a few other decent sized subs (30k-ish) actually and most of them are still growing, unless the topic at hand is clearly outdated.
Reddit throttled its API usage a month before the great 3rd party purge, so I'm guessing whatever collection method that site was using simply doesn't work correctly anymore. Or worse yet, the remnants of the API spits out completely incorrect data itself.
Sounds like Reddit itself has recovered in terms of raw numbers, but I (and others) have noticed yet another downtick in quality. Lot more bots (AI craze doesn't help. And despite the API narrative being used to counter them, they probably suferent the least), comments seem to be as hostile as early pandemic. But these are hard to measure objectively.
I'm on reddit a lot less these days, but subjectively it seems about the same for me, except most of the old subreddits I'm a legacy mod on are way busier than I remember. They're definitely still gaining users.
It could just be that the longer you're on there, the worse the quality appears to get to you as newcomers come. People always start to feel that way after being there some time. But then again people have been complaining about the quality of reddit going down literally almost as long as reddit has existed.
In my opinion Reddit has a content problem in the same way 24 hour news does. Simply put, there's not enough content to put up constantly so it's supplemented with repeating memes, reposts, and drama.
At the end of the day it comes down to the upvotes, though. If the other users are on your wavelength, you’ll probably like whatever they recommend. But over time you could have less in common with the average user there, meaning what they upvote will be less relevant to you too.
Bots seem to be more prevalent everywhere. For example, I’d say roughly 3/4ths of the followers on my twitter are obvious bot accounts with names like battery48462628 and that have either no comments at all or random Chinese foods and city pictures with captions like “flowers are the spice of life”.
