r/ModSupport • u/WonderfulWanderer777 • 21h ago

Huge influx of joining members without a cause, no change in activity, just numbers

Hello, I want to keep this brief for all:

I'm the mod of a small but active community on reddit and we had around 7.5k members with the regular growth rate being around 15-to-25 new members a day and around 50 on a very busy day.

About one or two week ago, we suddenly got a 100 new members, than 150 the next day. Than it blow to 700. Non-stop, we are getting 600 new members a day now. It blew our numbers to 21k members.

However, we have seen no change in activity. We still have the same level of activity we were seeing back when we had around 7k, there is no chance in page views or uniques either. There is also no cause we could find that we can tie this sudden influx of members. At this point I'm suspecting the new members are bots that inflate the numbers, however, we still don't know why and what's the real source. They are not voting bots, the level of up or down votes has stayed pretty much the same.

The only problem it is causing to my team is we can't accurately track our community size anymore.

I have written to admins to ask about this in the beginning of this too, but so far I haven't heard back form them. I also asked this in a number of places before around the same time, and often heard this was happening to a number of subreddits, so I don't think this is an issue special to us.

I would like the numbers to show us our actual, real numbers again- So is there anything we can do about this? Thank you all.

0 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

17% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

3

u/magiccitybhm 💡 Expert Helper 21h ago

Pretty sure you posted this on r/modhelp a bit earlier. As I answered there, this has been happening with many (MANY) subreddits over the past several weeks. To my recollection, admins have not communicated that there's a solution - or a way to give you a "non-bot" member count.

1

u/downvoteninja84 21h ago

Reddit did the same thing a few years ago, just prior to covid numbers of subscribers increased dramatically almost overnight.

Either a better way or tracking users entered the chat or they fudged the numbers. Probably both

1

u/esb1212 💡 Expert Helper 20h ago

I think they do have scheduled checking OR they can fix it for you once they see this post.

..the issue isn't more on detection being automatic but bot-like activity always evolving.. once they identify new trends, the behavior will be added to their standard checking.

1

u/downvoteninja84 20h ago

Yeah, this was also around the time when the IPO rumours started. So I'd still bank on both.

I mostly ignore subscribers data. Page views, or clicks/ whatever they call it seems to be a better engagement stat

1

u/gloomchen 💡 Skilled Helper 8h ago

If you're really concerned about it, send a modmail here and ask them to take a look at it. Some subs were getting bombed by subscriptions by bot accounts and it ended up getting the subs banned, with mods having to fight to get them restored. But most of those were thousands of subscriptions in a day vs. hundreds. Still worth being proactive about it. If admins find it's a pile of bot subscriptions, you might see your numbers roll back.