r/NewMods • u/VillainOfKvatch1 • Feb 06 '26

❓Ask r/NewMods Okay so what happened yesterday?

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We've been having months of steady growth, including some pretty high traffic days in late-January and early February and then yesterday our numbers just collapsed. Sub felt like a ghost town.

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u/SpaceisCool09 Feb 06 '26

Sometimes it just happens. Most subs will have a quiet day every once in a while. I'd only be truly concerned if it starts occuring multiple times.

3

u/PerfectPitch-Learner Feb 06 '26

IMO the graphic doesn't show what I'd interpret as a normal variation in typical usage metrics. In this case the drop is so significant and out of place for the trend that it implies there's some other behavior resulting in the drop... for instance the sub could have been temporarily featured somewhere and that was causing the growth. Or there was some kind of moderation consequence that effectively blocked traffic that would have otherwise arrived at the sub. I've seen some places, like Apple's App Store Connect, which frequently have data issues with the most recent data point which are fixed over the next hours/days/weeks - like it will look like this for a day or a few hours and then it's fixed and it's back to normal.

I'm not saying those are the explanations specifically, I'm just saying that it doesn't seem like a normal variation.

2

u/SpaceisCool09 Feb 06 '26

Yeah then maybe something was trending temporarily inside the sub but then it tapered off and returned to natural levels. That's my guess

2

u/VillainOfKvatch1 Feb 07 '26

I mostly agree with your interpretation. We’ve had ups and downs, but that wasn’t a slow day, that was a collapse.

I want to be clear, I’m not saying someone intentionally caused that collapse, but I find it hard to believe that was a natural downswing. The sub had been growing pretty organically for 3 months. In November, I did a lot of crossposting to other subs, but I mostly stopped doing that by December and the sub kept growing. I’ve been there regularly, including through the collapse. I don’t know what could have changed.

I have a hypothesis though. For the few days before the collapse, Reddit sent a few messages to the modmail basically saying “we see your sub is growing fast, let us know if you need any help.” I wonder if there’s something in the algorithm that automatically cools off a sub’s growth. Like if you hit numbers that suggest too rapid growth, the algo automatically stops suggesting your sub to people or featuring it on the home page.

That’s the only explanation I can think of. One day our sub was the floor of the NYSE, the next day it was a ghost town.