[OC] Zwei -Jahres -Retrospektive: Hat die Reddit -API -Kontroverse dazu geführt, dass Menschen Reddit verlassen haben?

The Data Source for this chart is self collected from bookmarked reddit usernames back in late June of 2023. I used Google Sheets to generate the chart itself.

This data is based on 164 users who had very clearly stated in **reddit posts that they would be leaving or quitting reddit if the API changes were to go through on July 1st, 2023**. I was very curious to see how many of them would actually follow through, as it seemed like an obvious move that Reddit needed to do, to protect it’s best asset from being harvested for free by LLM and AI scraping entities.

I attempted to get a representative sample, by finding major threads for each of the Reddit API based apps that were being shut down. In addition to just some major threads of people concerned with the API changes, I also tracked down at least one major thread for each of the following types of users: Apollo, BaconReader, and RIF.

**Takeaways**

For those who did leave permanently, a few of them mentioned that they would be „forced off“ the platform, as they did not know how to access their account they had created with the third party apps themselves. One person signed off by saying something like „See you on the other side, with a new account“. I would say almost a third of the people who did actually quit reddit cited this reason, which is not knowing how to sign into their reddit account that they had created with a third party app. (forgotten password, no account recovery info, etc)

Of those who deleted their accounts, I can’t know exactly when they deleted their accounts (or if they continued using Reddit after July of 2023), other than to say that 5% had deleted their account by July 1, 2024, and another 2.5% had deleted their accounts at some point between July 2024, and July 2025. Also, I don’t have any way to know how many people intentionally did something to break Reddit’s TOS as a means of leaving reddit, or if they did it for other reasons.

As far as the remaining folks who are still reddit users:

* 64% were still active at some point between August of 2023 and July 1, 2024
* 55.5% were still active between July 1 2024, and July 1, 2025

Remember, these are only users who wrote specifically in reddit posts that they were vowing to leave reddit, as that is the subset of user I wanted data on. I have zero data on the larger reddit userbase or how the API changes impacted less vocal Redditors‘ usage of the site.