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.
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.
I only use Reddit for one small niche hobby. And given that a bunch of those people still use Facebook, I'm not that surprised they haven't relocated to Lemmy.
I deleted nur Facebook Account sometime ago. I cleanly left all groups, "unfriended" all accounts (most of those were inactive anyways) and removed all my comments and media from over a decade.
I don't think I lost anything.
My timeline was full of advertising or bot post or mirrored content already available on other platforms. The only real interactions were in the comments and ever there it was soulless.
That's great about the Fediverse, the different bubbles are much smaller but much, mich more personal and connected.
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.
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.
Same; if I find the answer to a technical question in a Reddit thread by searching Google I may leave a comment for others but that's the only amount of interaction I have with the platform anymore. And I'm posting my questions to Lemmy exclusively.
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.
At best it is a technical forum for me. I have an account I've used since the days of the great digg migration. A lot of communities grew and became fun but most are now either dead or crap.
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.
Is that including the r/Australia main sub? I didn't go there very often because, well, it's just going to parochial at best but it was somewhere I'd see the occasional top post now and then. I probably first ever visited it and spent any time there around 2013 and it was weird man. It was so hardcore right-wing and overly political that it was impossible to browse it functionally, if I actually waded in on anything explicitly political in nature it was a nightmare. I also even had weirdly innocuous stuff I said just straight up deleted by mods, I'd never up until that point had interaction with any reddit mods so that felt just crazy. That was an abiding and striking memory of the place that I found very odd indeed and weirdly out of step with the experience of reddit in general. One gets used to their bubble and Reddit had always felt like 20-30 something year old male liberal-ish tech enthusiasts so when you accidentally step in to a mixture of a Liberal voter retirees and the One Nation fan club it's disconcerting. It meant that I was even less likely to ever really see or actively seek anything from that corner of Reddit.
A few years later I returned there, I can't remember when this would have been but I guess maybe 2018-ish? And then it'd gone a lot more normal. It's a general forum and there for interaction so I try not to describe and analyse exclusively through the lenses of 2 dimensional political leanings but it's useful here and I think it was accurate to say, it'd settled on a mainstreamish slightly left of centre type of crowd for most posts where politics featured. This was noted by the occasional disgruntled conservative who disliked having to be in relative minority, but nowhere near the vitriole of before. I always wondered if there'd been a cleaning of house or something, and how that managed to happen if so. I also always wondered where the previous majority of One Nation admirers had scurried off to. Having also quit Reddit a year ago, obviously I've not been back and between 2018 and last year I wouldn't have been in r/australia a great deal anyway, but if it's gone full Murdoch as your describing I wonder what weird forces were at work to bring it back to its former repellant mix of visitors and moderation policies.
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