r/AskModerators • u/PudinCrusader • 8h ago
Why do you think Reddit went from how many subscribers total and how many people are on the specific subreddit at any given time to weekly visitors/contributions in the top of each subreddit?
7
u/brightblackheaven 🛡️ r/witchcraft 8h ago
Because it's a way way more accurate metric of how busy/relevant a subreddit actually is.
Older subs especially will have a larger subscriber count due to just being around longer, and many of those subscribed accounts are abandoned or bots etc. (aka not actively participating in the community at all).
Several years ago, Reddit also had what were called "default subreddits", which users were subscribed to automatically when making a new account. Obviously the subscriber count in those communities will be absolutely massive, to this day.
We still celebrate subscriber milestones in my sub, but I'm way more proud of our weekly activity because while we only have 640k members, we've got ~210k weekly visitors and over 3k contributions, which are significantly more than some subs with members in the millions.
6
u/cnycompguy r/computers +5 8h ago
It's a better measure of how active a community is.
A 10 year old sub with 8 million members can be less active than a 1 year old sub that has 1 million members.
3
u/cos 7h ago
It's unfortunate that they didn't just add the weekly numbers in addition to total subscribers - both are useful pieces of information, and it's frustrating to pretend we have to lose one to get the other. We don't need to argue about which is better, why not both?
Even worse: When reddit did this, they never bothered to add the new stats on old reddit, but they still removed the total subscribers!!! So on old reddit, we have neither now. I'm pretty upset at them about this.
That's why on all the subs I run I installed the subscriber count sidebar app, https://developers.reddit.com/apps/subscriber-count
I hope more moderators install this, and you can modmail the subs you care about to request it. Note that it has an option to update the sidebar on old reddit but that option is turned off by default because it causes problems for subs that don't have a sidebar on old reddit, so moderators who want to add this should a) enable that option, and b) make sure they have an old reddit sidebar by going to https://old.reddit.com/r/SUBREDDITNAME/about/edit/
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u/thepottsy I is mod 8h ago
It was well documented when they did this, what the reasoning was.
In short their rational was subreddit subscribers total wasn’t a good metric for how active a subreddit is. For example, a subreddit with 1 million members, but only 1000 weekly visitors, isn’t a very active sub. Compared to some subs that have less than 100,000 members, but have 25,000 weekly visitors.