The fluctuations in usage on different times of the day is pretty huge, and there are regularly two days (weekends I presume, I haven’t checked) that also see lower usage than the other days. The ‘reduce noise’ button helps a little, but doesn’t filter this out.

I went ahead and bashed some Python onto the JSON that the API returned to see if I can figure out what happened to reddit usage amounts.

Horizontal: day of month
Vertical: comments per minute (CPM), relative to the average CPM of that 5-minute window of that day-of-week

For example, if a typical Monday 00:00–00:05 sees 5500 CPM, then a Monday 00:00–00:05 with a CPM of 6000 will be drawn on the graph as +500. Five minutes was chosen as a middle ground after hourly was found to be way too coarse and minutely caused noise from being too fine-grained.

Visualisation [OC]™ done in LibreOffice Calc by just copying the printed data into the spreadsheet and formatting the graph a little.

Limitations:

• Code is not well-tested; may have mistakes that skew the data
• Baseline data available only for a few days before the protest, so the averaging had to also be taken from post-protest data. If this influenced the results greatly, then the before-protest CPM ought to show up as through the roof, which they’re not. Excluding the protest days from averages counting made things also makes things look more sensible, but since there was no hard end day, it’s not very precise.
• Not sure if average is the right method. Trying the median, everything gets more spikey, though
• Notice the small gap just before the downwards spike towards midnight on the 11th: there was an outage here which pushed the CPM off the charts (downwards). Since that’s not representative of how many users were trying to engage with reddit (what I’m trying to establish), I deleted those handful of data points. Only lasted an hour anyway, not much lost on the scale of a month.

Conclusions and discussion:

• The protest had an easily measurable impact on reddit usage, which is as much as I could have hoped for. (Note that the total/absolute CPM fluctuates between ~3k at night somewhere-on-earth and ~7k at peak. At its deepest, the protest reduced CPM by about 1.8k.) Having one’s opinion heard is what a protest does, so mission accomplished there.
• Not all subreddits coming back online on the 14th makes it hard to say whether users were boycotting reddit of their own volition (my camp), or if they simply couldn’t post comments in the places they’d ordinarily frequent. Either way, there was a prolonged effect.
• Around June 27–28, the CPM value is back to what it was before the protest started: just above relative zero. (That means the averages err slightly on the low side, which is expected per the limitations.) This is also when I decided to open reddit again, to show in the stats that I would still be an active user if I could use RIF.
• Most notably and most worryingly, people being cut off on June 30th made no distinguishable difference whatsoever. The value is still hovering just abo