Reddit used to be a great platform to discuss some topic and get different points of few in a friendly but factual manner. However, slowly it seems like the platform has become a lot more like Facebook, where it's been invaded by toxic people that are constantly looking for opportunities to shit and hate on others.
The change has been gradual so I really didn't notice it creep up on me. It's become super evident now having used Kbin and others for a week or so where people generally seem to be more friendly again and willing to actually discuss things in a usually civil way.
The difference is stark too. Today I replied to a comment saying that I hope things turn out better for them and wound up in a weird comment chain about how people were apparently insensitive for wanting to get a basic haircut that they for some reason couldn't afford themselves. Meanwhile, Kbin and the Fediverse feels like a refreshing place to actually converse with people once you get past the clunk and figure it out.
I think Reddit may well have reached that main stream social media saturation point where it very objectively now sucks. It happened originally with the internet itself thanks to the rise of the smartphone and this is just another iteration of it. I feel like Spez might as well get that bag at this point because they've ruined what used to be the platform people went to for social media without the bullshit, without algorithms to drive "engagement" and to avoid the toxic culture that has prevailed.
Thanks for reading my rant.
Because Reddit got a reputation for being lenient on people who are toxic. I gave up on general, current affairs or regional subs a long time ago it's only smaller communities I'm leaving now.
Think of r/incels or r/The_Donald, r/GenderCritical, r/NoNewNormal etc - and they're the examples from recent, more generally appealing years after the subs named after slurs were nuked. These are the subreddits that got mainstream attention, they may no longer be on Reddit, but their members are, and anyone who would be drawn to them is still signing up, on the other hand lots of people have been turned off the site by those associations. It's not just that there's lots of people joining the site, it's who those people are.
In the same vein it's a really easy site to astroturf and there's no doubt in my mind that the "culture wars" are being stoked there because of it. Because there's a market for aged accounts for use in political astroturfing or general product shilling there are companies running the same shitty repost bots everywhere to produce them. It's a cycle that seems to be getting shorter and shorter.
My conspiracy theory is that almost no genuine posts have made it to the front of r/all in years. The only way to gain the tens of thousands of upvotes you need in the narrow window of time you have to get on rising is to have a botnet mass-upvoting your post in those first few critical seconds.
It would explain why r/all nowadays is half lazy reposts of unfunny memes, and half obvious agendaposting.