Prior to the protest reddit was in full support of the protest. Most polls on subs supported a shutdown. Now, seemingly every community cant understand why the protest was needed and they’re calling it a mod power trip. There is a 3rd possibility. This is an unfounded conspiracy but reddit themselves could be manipulating scores.
See the NFL thread if you don’t mind sending traffic
https://reddit.com/r/nfl/comments/14b11kh/were_just_here_so_we_dont_get_fined/
As a moderator of a small subreddit, when I checked roughly 75% of our traffic was from mobile. It doesn’t distinguish beyond that but the mobile browser experience is so shockingly bad I think it’s safe to say that is almost entirely app usage. Since there is only official app & Apollo on iOS, that means it’s one of those two… but the way Huffman tells it, Apollo has less than 5% of the install base of the official app on iOS. If that’s the case I don’t really understand his argument that they’re bleeding Reddit dry. But that’s a separate issue.
But, based on the responses we had before the blackout and the responses we got in the last few days “after” in the discussions around opening back up, I can say he appears to be right. Most people just want to use the main app, don’t want to learn anything about third party apps, don’t care why they exist, just want everyone to shut up and move on.
I did find the total 180 very odd. Vote was overwhelmingly in favor of the protest beforehand. Overwhelmingly in favor of going back to normal after. But it was different people. And it wasn’t just random one-week-old accounts that had never posted on the sub before, it was regulars, old accounts, or both, both times.
I’m proud of the properly big subs for continuing their protests. Our community was not strong enough.
I saw this as an explanation, and it’s so stupid it makes perfect sense
Reddit doesn’t have to guess though. API usage has clientID information. They could easily keep a tally of requests per client and get exact numbers.
Can back up those splits, top 5% sub. Majority is on mobile, but stats on platform are difficult to estimate. It would seem that at least 10% of Android is on 3rd party apps. The downloads don’t give accurate estimates at the top end (10 mil downloads, then it won’t change until 100mil downloads, so you could be off by tens of millions), it doesn’t count side loaded apks, and it doesn’t specify usage time. There could be a ton of people who downloaded the official app, then moved to 3rd party, and they would count for official download.