this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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I used to love reddit. Especially because it was so diverse. So many communities living side by side generally pretty well (except the well-known toxic communities of course that we all knew to stay away from). And the everything-goes attitude, like people discussing religion on the same site as people exhibiting their sex lives :P I used to love seeing that kind of diversity (ok and the exhibitionism too, I admit ๐คญ, I'm just into that.). I just loved the everything-goes feeling about it.
But two things went wrong as I see it. One was that US society got more and more polarised and toxic due to Trump and most of reddit's users are from the US. Even the people who used to be pretty nice are so triggered by anything you say "wrong", they always think you're trying to pull them into an argument for the "other side". It's like they have PTSD from being constantly attacked by the other side and it causes that knee-jerk reaction on anything that doesn't fall 100% into their narrative. I got so sick and tired of that hostility especially because I was not used to it locally. That thing you mention, where you say something and someone always claims you're making it up to make a point or karma or whatever is so familiar and tiring.
And the other thing was of course that idiot spez. Trying to clean up reddit for his precious investors by removing (or locking away) anything not above the belt, killing third-party apps, etc. I still go there once in a while to gather some information but I stay away from discussions and I rotate my accounts every couple of months. So I don't give a crap about karma because I kill my accounts anyway. In fact even when I did have a long-term account I used to "shreddit" it every couple of months so karma was not something I ever cared about.
The sad thing is that this Trump toxicity has now even blown over to my country (Holland). They elected a total fascist 2 months ago and the same thing is happening there now, there are lots of people claiming they were never heard and now their hero is going to drain the swamp and kick out all the refugees and all that same old blahblah. Several of my "friends" were caught up in this BS and I've had to break off all contact with them. ๐ก
Even Lemmy is not free from this, I joined lemmy.ml for a while but I found it pretty toxic too. Lemmy.world looked similar. This is why I came here and it's been great so far.
I don't believe this is a US problem. Dates do match with all the Trump nonsense but it happened pretty much worldwide. Look at UK, Australia, Philippines, Brazil, Mexico. All of them had the same divide in society with politics at the center. I think it's social media and the attention-hungry algorithms that do not care about the side effects. That is what is pulling people apart. Spending hours a day in an indoctrination environment just because 'clicks and ads and $$'. Laws to prevent this are waaaay too late. Damage is done. And what horrible damage these things did... What horrible damage these people did... And are still doing unchecked.
Reddit's always had a toxicity problem (see: Ellen Pao), but there was definitely a shift in 2015. It lines up with the political divide, but I think it was just a symptom of a larger problem. Because of a certain subreddit, a lot of new people were introduced to reddit. When they finally released an official app (lol, or rather they stole it and rebranded it as their own), there was a massive influx of users.
I'm not all "reddit was better when there were fewer users" because it wasn't. But there was a cultural shift when it became much more widely promoted by app stores and all. It got users from all kinds of backgrounds, but it also got... I don't know. Different. Maybe oversaturated, which kind of made it difficult to find more quality content.
The only good thing about reddit toward the end of my original time with it (I've been browsing lately, but not much because the app fucking sucks*) was niche communities, some funny content creators, and some NSFW subs (some of which have been absolutely gutted, if not banned entirely, since the incident).
A lot of those subs are irreplaceable. There's just too much previous content and a mass of users that won't ever migrate to something like Lemmy. Niche communities can still be kind of successful here due to inherently less users, but it still lacks diversity because those niche subs still had a really healthy dose of active users, which often exceeded the amount of users subscribed to some popular Lemmy communities.
A lot of them started turning to shit earlier, but they were manageable with filters and what have you. Plus the good mods were really good. Some left, some stayed, but the divide kind of fucked a lot of subs.
* Technically, there are other apps you can still use on Android without needing a paid subscription (eg. RedReader, Stealth, patching with Revanced), but they can be a bit finicky sometimes. Although, so can the official one, so it doesn't make much of a difference.