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.

The quality of Reddit has been declining for the last ~5 years. Even if you ignore all the shady shit Reddit themselves have done, the platform has been declining due to simple popularity. Simple-brained people joining and upvoting memes and reposts and fucking TikToks. There’s also just the toxicity of society in general. There used to be honest discussions and nuance and input from industry experts. Now it’s incredibly corporate, and hardcore liberal, and full of the same toxicity as Twitter.

It used to be mostly Libertarians and Atheists, kinda like how Lemmy is all sysadmins and Linux enthusiasts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

It ain’t the same, and probably never will be…

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 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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.