I go back to Reddit now from time to time. Mostly to ask specific questions in communities that are niche and don't exist on here. They are the only good interactions I see that are just as good as here. Elsewhere it's just different. I've not been able to put my finger on why, myself like. But it's definitely not the same.

Some things cannot be replaced. Spez destroyed something wonderful. There's no going back.

08 reddit was vastly different than 12 reddit which was vastly different than 16 reddit which was vastly different than 20 reddit which was vastly different than 24 reddit.

For what it’s worth, they’re all terrible in their own unique ways. Aside from a brief window some time after 16 but before 20, during which bots and hate speech were both heavily moderated. Except in conservative spaces, but there’s no polishing those turds.

Reddit has been generic for several years now. It’s, mostly, addictive trash content. I miss individual subs but the algorithm for popular / front page posts is doing the same thing every other social platform is doing. If that’s your jam, go for it. I value my time enough that I don’t need to be entertained by an algorithm. I hate it. A lot.

Edit:
I mean, I just went to reddit.com and the top post is a 21 year old married woman asking how to tell their 18 year old cousin they stink because they only shower every 3-4 days. THIS is engaging content? WTF is wrong with you people? This is why I'm thrilled to have left that dumbass platform.

I see more racism, sexism and other bigotry than before. Although there certainly was a lot of that back then as well. Also bots.

there's still some great subreddits, but many of the mainstream ones have devolved into right wing cesspools

I can't even use Reddit anymore wince they don't allow VPN users in. (I won't turn it off for them)

The other day I was on one of those cloned threads where all the top starter responses were old copied responses posted by bots with numbers at the ends of their names and no one in the organically new comments even noticed. Just a few minutes ago I followed a link from the vanilla reddit homepage (I refuse to sign in to reddit but I keep going back anyway like a little baby brain) and there was a thread about a pride parade which was disrupted by a pro-Palestinian protest. All the pro-Palestinian comments were downvoted and all the highest voted comments were mocking "leftists." In summary, fuck reddit, and this was the perfect moment for me to read your post.

I was active - and I mean ACTIVE - on reddit for well over a decade. When the API fiasco happened, I deleted my mobile apps, and stuck to desktop. When 'opt out of selling your data' became impossible, I logged out for good.

Lemmy is both better and worse than reddit ever was. It will likely never reach the same activity level, but will also not reach the same toxicity.

Reddit hasn't felt the same for me since around 2021/22.

At some point it stopped being a platform for niche communities to come together and became a cesspool of corporate/government astroturfing and karma farm bots with a side of real people.

I wasn't active there before that. To me Reddit just got more and more and more annoying over the last few years.

"Recreational" communities were banned, technical communities were flooded with only slightly related nonsense, meme and fun communities felt just dumb. A lot of communities als felt unfriendly and unwelcoming. Not within two days, but it eroded over the years.

At one point it felt like a burden to go through my subscribed communities feed. So I stopped using Reddit entirely during the protests and disabled my account (and it wasn't re-enabled by Reddit to prevent loss of users) and I do not miss it one single second.

During web research I sometimes get a Reddit result. I change to old.reddit.com URL (I have a strict ruleset regarding cookies and JS and the normal Reddit is just shows an error message and I am not willing to change my configuration) to get the information, but that's it. Neither do I interact with anything nor do I use any type of account.

It really depends on what sub(s) you visit. Some subs didn't have a lot of mobile users to begin with, so they didn't see much change in their core active members.

The default sort/filter for the front page there is trash now. I typically see the same things hovering there for days.

its all bots now. like its been getting worse and worse and i'm not surprised if theres now a much higher percentage of bots in there compared to that time.

i stuck it out past the protest up until the day the company went public, and I can testify without any doubt that the downward spiral increased dramatically post protest. It got so bad that even though I go back to check my local sub, I haven't once felt tempted to create a new account. I began to dread any actual interaction with other accounts

The only places there that haven't changed are the tiny game subs, to my limited willingness to use the site. I have checked the niche subs I used to moderate, and all but one is swamped with bullshit. Even that one has changed some. The only ones of those unchanged are the ones I had set to private ages before spez threw his little hissy-fit. The ones that were public are either dead, botted, or just unchecked insanity with bad moderation. Spam everywhere.

I haven't gone to reddit.com and browsed around since I left.

But one thing that HASN'T changed is I'll search ddg for an answer to a random problem and the most helpful link is a reddit post, either from long ago or recently.

Large subs are unreadable bot garbage. Small subs are still the same questions that have been answered a million times over and over. New OC is so rare that it gets drowned in low effort shit posts. At this point I don’t even open a tab anymore, just scroll lemmy till there’s no ‚new‘ stuff and then carry on with the day

I've felt that the popular subreddits were on a decline ever since Reddit was featured in so many YouTube slop videos, but with time the effect of identity loss is becoming increasingly obvious. The crowd on there is not what it used to be. Gone is the desire for accurate information, meaningful comments, sources, and giving credit. Reddit is no longer a niche product but a mainstream one that my parents and "normie" friends know and it reflects in the lower quality content and user participation.

My big issue is that a lot of the Aussie subs went full right wing (Murdoch media type stuff.

I don't even bother browsing it anymore.

Really hope we keep the click bait out of here and keep the more scientifically oriented community

I use it for some niche communities too. Small communities are not infected with bots fortunately. Apart from that, it sucks more than before for sure.

I had been active on Reddit for close to 15 years, and left due to the API decisions. That move feels more justified every time I bump into Reddit, from being unable to view programming questions from a work VPN, to the emails begging me to invest in their IPO, to their exec pay fiasco.

Reddit is a shell of what it was, but I think this is largely due to stepping away from it. I know several people that use it religiously, and they don't notice it as much as I do.

In a similar vein, Lemmy can have some absolutely batshit views too, and can also be incredibly toxic at times. We just don't notice it as much because we're used to it, but I bet some people new to Lemmy would see some posts/comments and think "eh, no thanks". I won't say that Lemmy is as toxic as Reddit, but the community size makes it more obvious on Reddit.

I still use Reddit for queer nsfw content (for now) and r/all is getting worse by the day, and it was already pretty bad for years

Yeah, feels like most of the big and medium subs have devolved into karma farms. Zero substance.

[ F U C K R E D D I T ]

It ain't the same, and probably never will be....

I switched to this instance so that I'd have access to lemmit, now that I have lemmit, I don't miss anything from reddit except the comments

Haven't been back there other than for some old post that came up in google search, i used to dwell in my country sub since 2017 or something, back then the community is around or below 10k, and it feels, emm, non time-wasting? Then it growth into 200k in just a few years. A year before the API fiasco even happen, i noticed something off, the people who frequent there is getting younger and angrier, bad behaviour irl is lauded, dumb and edgy and joke opinion is upvoted, discussion tend to lead to shouting match very quickly. At that moment i felt that the community isn't like what it used to be and started to feels like maybe i should quit. Fast forward to the API fiasco, lot of pushback against blackout from terminally online folks who can't even stop using reddit for 2 days, i took the jump to lemmy and never looked back. I don't miss that shitty platform one bit.

Not saying Lemmy doesn't have any problem, but it doesn't have as much rage bait content here.

I browse Reddit only for one sub, a country-specific one that is reasonably niche. Right when the API migration happened, there seemed to be a very visible migration of Facebook/Instagram people migrating over to Reddit. Posts asking where to find Instagram/Facebook functionality came in daily, and the overall quality of both comments and posts degraded a lot, suddenly posts had a ton of comments with one word and a ton of emojis.

I occasionally popin for subreddit drama. That's how I found out today about pizzacake's tone deaf comic about 'toxic masculinity'.

I also abandoned ship and signed up for Lemmy on June 12. we’re twinses.

After I left I noticed how much of my Reddit feed was and is garbage. Most are meaningless memes. That's after removing meme subs.

Honestly this is probably how I subconciously felt on reddit for maybe a few years before I left. In all the slightly larger subreddits you could mostly predict how the comment section would look like. Mostly the same jokes and the same answers. The best posts also felt like they were made by people who put in a lot of time to figure out how to get to the frontpage and once you yourself made a post it would mostly be removed for some reason or buried. On Lemmy it is also much easier to see other opinions that are not directly downvoted into oblivion but rather discussed and as long as the person does not behave like an idiot the discussion is interesting.

Yea anything big and mainstream just seems super shallow.

I'm not on top of things to compare accurately, but it was always kinda like that (and is like that here sometimes too). But whenever I've gone back, I've definitely felt like it has gotten somewhat worse. Some of that could easily be a shifting standard from spending more time on other less "mainstream" platforms though.

Like you I left in June 2023. Haven't been back though.

They drove away a ton of active users with the whole API thing. Makes sense conversation isn't the same there anymore. The people posting and commenting left with the apps that make it convenient to... post and comment. Such an own goal by reddit.

For me, it was not being able to use a 3rd party app. Accessing reddit through their garbage app is a painful experience. And unless I find the answer to a question via web search that's a reddit thread, I avoid it entirely.