Phrasing like that reminds me of all the "this is the commu-social-marxism the libs want" and it's just a picture of current capitalism.

to this i'd like to add that when i browse there sometimes i keep seeing people saying things like "this is reddit libs are everywhere" "this is reddit even slight conservatism will make people call for a death sentence" or "this is reddit you can't say anything non-progressive" and those are getting many upvotes, whilst anything said that'd paint you as anywhere left of centre will get you downvoted.

it seems like the conservatives have taken over and yet they still feel like they're surrounded

Bot posts, upvotes, comments from 1d accounts quadruppled since I'm very sceptical about the projected stats. It's like the first human users setup a social culture and as time progresses new users see the potentials and become the first "parasites" of a settled community. A bot army is just a tool.

Hehe thanks I’m not to clued up on my ‘isms but I know it’s something I don’t like! I am watching the American story with an outsiders perspective and it’s doesn’t look good. I’ve never been deep into data, but I have seldom gone wrong by reading the people. And the people are spelling downfall, I think it’s further down the slope than people realise and the opposition smell blood. Just like Reddit.

It was a sign the moment they suppressed Luigi news in December, just one week after CEO"s death

I was there from day one.

When Spez implemented user registration, I was like the 5th sign up and I ended up mailing him his own source code because he had his server misconfigured to report verbose errors.

All this to say, the site has always sucked. From day one it has sucked. It has never not sucked.

Edit

I feel like Reddit in general is remembered far more fondly than it ever has a right to.

For those that believe Reddit was some bastion of intellectual discourse, it never was! The very first or second conversation I was involved in (remember it didn't even have users or comments at one point) immediately devolved into people calling each other robots and morons.

It just immediately cast my mind back to the BBS days where there was some cool techy people but lots of people that were just... there... And bored... And stupid.

I didn't never really changed from that formula. Reddit grew somewhat in tandem with overall NA society's ability to just get on the Internet. And it was always just a slice of society, never really any special qualifications or commonalities generally speaking. It's very naive and myopic to think that it was a Tech community. It's every dingbat you've ever met in your life and all the cool people as well in a giant heap. Please don't kid yourself.

Politics immediately took over the site. And as most people know, the dialogue surrounding American politics is most dignified by taking place within a monkey house at the zoo.

Politics was immediately quarantined into its own special sub thingy.

Spez being the absolute moron that he was, implemented communities instead of tags which is what the fking site actually needed. It was very obvious he had bananas in his ears at that point, and he did not want to give selective content control to the users. He didn't even want to implement communities, he was that against it.

They refused to show at the outset that giving users the ability to categorize content mattered. They wanted it to be a fire hose of content right from day one.

Later, they did an amazing public relations job of faking community and faking community spirit, while they had secretly embedded social media managers from outside agencies plugging most of the content onto the front page.

I can't remember the first time Reddit lost its virginity or perhaps had its heart broken, maybe first coming of age... when we collectively rooted out that one of the biggest community builders and participants was actually a plant! I might be wrong but somewhere in the back of my mind I remember the username Sahadra(?).

Exactly. Not communist though, fascist.

Was going to say this, lol.

Completely agree otherwise with the op.

Bots. I swear its all bots reposting content from 10 years ago that people might not have seen yet or rewording old posts/comments. Check the account history and posts if something seems suspicious. Usually those people have lived all over the place, are different genders and have lives different time lines... Unless reddit is now all whovians... im calling bots

Twitter had a suspiciously convenient massive uptick in bots that conveniently hid the shrinking user base from investors. I expect Reddit to conveniently have the same "problem".

I have been off reddit since the api thing so I'm way out of touch with the current content and status.

It just seems odd all these posts about Reddit dying and it makes me think of the people that loved reddit aren't all here on Lemmy, so did they quit all of it or went somewhere else?

No one I know in person switched away, technical or not, they still use reddit. The whole situation is just not adding up.

The most vocal does not necessarily represent the majority

By reddits own admission 50% we're all bots. I think it was reported in the tech sub like years back. Reddit wants to be a Facebook clone.

I really feel like it peaked in 2012 or 2013. Hot on the heels of the "rally to restore the sanity" (which proved the true power of Reddit, but was co-opted and defanged)

Lots of big AMAs but they could be very chaotic.

Allowed content wasn't quite as wild as two years previous but it was still possible to find some real taboo/NSFL/disturbing/subversive communities of all sorts.

The userbase was large but still most of your friends would make fun of you for going there, and your parents didn't even know it existed.

The admin team was still pretty small and they even would make a point to hire users who understood the culture and spirit of the site.