So what? Hemorrhaging users and trying to hide that? To protect stock value?

Is this to hide bots somehow? Hide subscriber loses?

The member count is being replaced by two metrics. One shows how many users have visited a subreddit in the past seven days, “based on a rolling 28-day average,” according to Reddit, and the other displays how many contributions have been made in the past seven days, excluding any posts or comments that have been removed.

Imo this is actually not too bad an idea, though I don't quite follow what the fuck visitors in the last 7 days needs a rolling 28 day average for. Even before I left the site years ago, there were plenty of subreddits that had huge subscriber numbers and no activity anymore. Or activity that didn't reflect those numbers. Kind of like with some of your old favorite channels on youtube, people don't really unsubscribe so places that you used to visit a lot may have a lot of those numbers still but then you see their videos getting a few hundred views or posts only ever getting a dozen upvvotes. Those metrics will show actual current and recent activity of the subreddit instead of possibly inaccurate legacy numbers.

It's not necessarily based on whether or not a platform is dying to make this kind of a decision because even in a healthy site, areas age and fall out of favor inevitably, users move on to different interests, etc.

Literally haven't regretted a single day since I left that platform, fuck reddit

Obligatory fuck spez

Ah, the old stock-pumping strategy of cooking the books and only sharing good numbers. Never change, Reddit.

At first I thought it’d be a good change because subscriber count can really distort size of the community on older subreddits. On the other hand - given that this whole thing runs on inertia I don’t see how new metrics solve this. Big subreddits will stay big because they’re big already.

But it won't detect the bots that it doesn't want to, so the numbers will just be bullshit.

"Buy ads based on my fictional metrics, please!"

Ofc they will, so the can inflate participation with bots all they want.

If bots weren't counted, it wouldn't actually be a bad metric IMO.

Fuck reddit, it's all fucking bots and Russians at this point.

Good, glad I stopped contributing to Reddit. We need to stop being so dependable on US social media giants.

Much better than long dead accounts that subscribed.