I find it very interesting that this is reportedly one of the top subs on all of Reddit: “Comments Per Day” ranks it #1, by Subscribers or Posts Per Day it is #2, Growth (Day) and Growth (Month) are both #5, Growth (Month) and Growth (Year) are both #4, etc.

Not only that, it is by far the top sub by this “Comments Per Day” metric: it shows 15828 Comments reported in a recent 24-hr period of time, whereas the next highest sub is r/worldnews with a mere 5153 Comments Per Day, then r/AmItheAsshole and r/nfl also ~5k, then others rapidly falling further like r/NoStupidQuestions and r/AITAH each ~3k, etc.

To reiterate: this is the #1 sub over all of Reddit, with >3x more comments per day than any other sub, and like more comments than the next 3 subs all combined… and it still has fallen off a cliff, even by this same exact metric.

I do not know how reliable subredditstats.com is overall, but even if it were not so good lately, so long as all the stats are more or less evenly biased across all the subs, we should still be able to learn something from these comparisons? (please add a correction if you know of some evidence that this is not true) One caveat is that it might be harder to compare now vs. pre-API changes? But if it can be believed, the numbers fell from a peak of >100k in June 2023, to a more average ~75k, then dropped like a rock in July to ~15k and has remained hovering around that area ever since…

I do not visit popular subs on Reddit anymore, just one that has refused to migrate to Lemmy/Kbin, but this sounds entirely believable to me. If you click the links to the top posts, the very title titles of the posts and top comments to them also showcase the change: like the #2 top post to that sub is “Now that Reddit are killing 3rd party apps on July 1st what are great alternatives to Reddit?” w/ 78.1k upvotes, and has the top comment w/ 5.2k upvotes of “I might get back into reading books after over a decade.” (and other comments likewise, pointing to Reddit alternatives, and angry exclamations about the 3rd party apps going away)

In short, THIS seems to be the evidence that we have been waiting for all this time, about just how far Reddit has fallen / died off?

Although comments on Lemmy/Kbin I do not think have risen by +~50k or so per day, so I wonder where all that Reddit traffic went? Possibly as the aforementioned comment said, it went offline, basically nowhere.

Edit: I nominated this post to m/BestOf.