>"Member counts don’t tell the whole story. In most cases, Redditors don’t need to be a member of a community to post or comment, which means member totals have never fully reflected true engagement"

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>“By emphasizing active participation over passive membership, we’re continuing to highlight what makes Reddit unique: real people engaging in real conversations.”

That seems valid.

A lot of communities with absent moderators are "active", have high subscribers, and yet the submissions have wandered off topic and the discussion dead. The community looks active, but isn't.

I'd like this to extend even farther to limiting the influence of accounts who don't actively participate in conversation / the sub ... brand new accounts, accounts that ONLY submit or only participate in their own content.

I joined /r/gamedeals as a mod when the subscriber count was ~25k I left when I think it was ~700k That's a pretty good increase, yet despite the huge increase in numbers this was not reflected in upvotes and comment numbers.

https://old.reddit.com/r/GameDeals/top/

There will be multiple reasons why this happened but changing to this new metric - engagement - makes sense.

At one point the sub mods were asked by the reddit admins if we wanted to be in the default selection for new users and we declined. It will be interesting to see how defaults are now offered given that I understand the default was based on subscriber numbers.