There are a lot of people who are/were totally ok with Reddit after the blackout starting, only commenting that people are fucking stupid, and they need to shut up about it already. I know a couple people like this.

Honestly, Meta, TikTok, twitter, etc have already shown us people honestly don’t give a shit, as long as they get their serotonin/dopamine fix.

Personally, I haven’t intentionally been back since the 11th, and the only times I’ve accidentally gone there, it was for the 3 seconds it took me to close it down. And I don’t intend to go back.

Stopped using it is one thing, using it less another. 3.6m out of 52 is what? 8% of the entire user base suddenly stopped, including a lot of important mods, which are hard to replace in that quality? And the rest of the user base I can imagine have less activity in Reddit, meaning less content creation, replies and therefore less advertisement seen. And some people may just trolling more than before, trying to destroy Reddit, some use Bots.

The overall quality is less than before, not better I assume. And a little bit less user than before. The site has a bad image now, so I can imagine some are waiting until alternatives are build and grow on Lemmy or Kbin in example and will switch later. So hard numbers of how many people stopped using the site is not telling the entire story. One has to open the book and read the lines, not just judge the cover story.