It’s pretty simple. Reddit as a company seems to have been on a path for years where they have done everything they possibly can to make the site more corporate at the expense of Reddit as a community.
I’ve been on Reddit for years (I deleted at least two accounts before sticking with my now 14-year-old account).
To put it in context, my Reddit account is older than my child, who has his own Reddit account.
There were a lot of things on Reddit that I found annoying but it was easy to ignore. I was saddened by the way they fired Victoria and unfairly blamed it on Ellen Pao, and the effects of those decision s including the noticeable degradation in quality and corpoatization of AMA posts.
I also hated how blatant advertising and astroturfing kept showing up more and more and did not like the way practically everything turned into politics and divisiveness in a more recent era.
But again, most of that was pretty easy to avoid and I could just stick to my little niche subreddits that I liked, ignore the rest of the content, and view the site and a format I like because I could use a third party app. I never really cared for new Reddit and especially hated the official Reddit app, and with that being gone and ads and chat being forced on me, I’m done with it.
I agree with you on all these points. I’d also add that the amount of bot interaction and manipulation has increased to a point where it felt a lot of the communities were meaningfully less real over the last couple of years. Makes it a lot less fun.
It’s pretty simple. Reddit as a company seems to have been on a path for years where they have done everything they possibly can to make the site more corporate at the expense of Reddit as a community.
I’ve been on Reddit for years (I deleted at least two accounts before sticking with my now 14-year-old account). To put it in context, my Reddit account is older than my child, who has his own Reddit account.
There were a lot of things on Reddit that I found annoying but it was easy to ignore. I was saddened by the way they fired Victoria and unfairly blamed it on Ellen Pao, and the effects of those decision s including the noticeable degradation in quality and corpoatization of AMA posts.
I also hated how blatant advertising and astroturfing kept showing up more and more and did not like the way practically everything turned into politics and divisiveness in a more recent era.
But again, most of that was pretty easy to avoid and I could just stick to my little niche subreddits that I liked, ignore the rest of the content, and view the site and a format I like because I could use a third party app. I never really cared for new Reddit and especially hated the official Reddit app, and with that being gone and ads and chat being forced on me, I’m done with it.
I agree with you on all these points. I’d also add that the amount of bot interaction and manipulation has increased to a point where it felt a lot of the communities were meaningfully less real over the last couple of years. Makes it a lot less fun.