I disagree - I was on Reddit since before the Digg exodus, so I may or may not know a few things. There was a big mood shift after the mod strike. It really shook the page - some subreddits never “recovered”. Some that were popular before are still in a kind of lockdown. Some have new mods which are not doing a really great job. There were a few that really grew. But overall, Reddit lost a lot. People did delete decades of useful advice. Regular users left. The new ones are … different. In many cases mobile users that kind of seem to use Reddit as a chat platform, but they are not posting really insightful comments. Some are indistingushable from bots. Many are bots. Some mods have just given up and gave up moderating popular subreddits, which are now drowning in repost bost. There are bots replicating whole threads under reposts. Many subreddits are just old screenshots from Twitter. It’s wild - but it is hollow. And that was different a few years back.
Reddit has become a zombie website.
All of the cool people left and the only people that are still hanging out are the people who don’t know any better and the people who are there to try to market themselves as some kind of brand.
Is this why I feel I am the dumbest illiterate person surrounded by literate intellectuals here, while in reddit, I felt more or less average?
It’s getting hard to remember when Reddit was just that little weird link sharing icon on articles that few people (relatively speaking for the time) bothered with. Digg shitting the bed gave Reddit the push it needed to become recognisable.
Funny now that Digg exists solely as a ‘frontpage’ full of clickbait titles and a ‘community’ made entirely of comment boxes. Yet it perseveres in its own little corner.
Now we have Reddit in the place of Digg and the fediverse in the place of Reddit - history really does repeat itself.
