User visits and time spent on the social media platform normalize after traffic to Reddit briefly dipped last week during the blackout, according to SimilarWeb.
Edit: but also see https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/88139/Reddit-traffic-returning-normal-sort-of which explains that ad visits are still waaay down - and continue going downhill.
That said, I really like this insightful take:
https://kbin.social/m/reddit/p/528198/https-www-pcmag-com-news-as-reddit-crushes-protests-its-user-traffic-returns-to-normal-lol-we-re-all-great-and-powerful-piggies-aren-t-we#post-comment-934433
TL;DR - the protests worked, also expect to see a different headline once we reach June 30.
There’s also the longer term effect that could be in play of the content pool drying up and driving users away, those changes are reverberations and wouldn’t be having a dramatic immediate effect.
Right now if anything I’d expect views to be spiking due to the content generated from the drama itself. Once that dies out then damages to content generation from driving away users will be more evident.
That and getting the ball rolling. Didn’t Meta’s activity pub idea only really leak in the past week or so when this whole reddit drama started?
Not to mention, this is user stats, not mod stats. Reddit with no moderation would have a pretty quick expiry date. Normal users no longer doomscrolling once they hear about an abstract software principle was never the plan (or at least I hope it wasn’t).
Yeah, I admit I’m still going to check my news multireddit every day, but I’m literally just reading the links, not the comments. And once Relay stops working that will stop happening.
Hopefully by the next time spez or his cohorts do something stupid, all of the dev talent this shit show has attracted to the fediverse will have made migration more intuitive.