Reddit started becoming shitty because people are shitty.

It started long before the API restrictions, long before the commercialisation.

No, it started failing when the influx of new users grew exponentially, but the systems to support it didn't.

Subreddits were no longer communities, they became information and discussion hubs.

With the influx of people, further moderation was needed. But mod vetting isn't that easy, and a lot of people who had absolutely no business moderating communities, let alone social hubs, got a whiff of power that drove them crazy.

And that leads to splinter communities, some abandoned, some forced to give up, and an overall mess to this all.

I think it was experimental negative social engineering that, over time, got worse. Then the advertising overlords started to break through.

Control is crucial. I think there should be a foundation to own the development but controlled by a board of moderators. Something like the concorde agreement is needed.

I don’t believe it was the size either despite what many in the comments state. I believe it’s been several compounding factors. For me it’s karma and karma farming. People only do things for attention when they have reason to believe it will provide benefits for them. People do what they are allowed to do. When you go to an establishment where the cultures and rules are set people are unlikely to deviate. I couldn’t reasonably get upset at an establishment that requires certain attire, no loud voices, limited alcoholic beverages and believe I can and should do the opposite. If more subreddits operated like such then Reddit would be very different. Unfortunately, that doesn’t align with Reddits goals of content and users pretty much at any cost to make the money go up.

Enshittification started as soon as owners of popular sites realized they can’t keep everything free for long, they felt it was time to make money. And begin getting rid of content deemed hostile to advertisers and corporate sponsors.

Reddit was fine if you stuck to the right communities. This morning my browser session suddenly got blocked though, forcing me to download the app (which I won’t do).

Even if size does become a problem (SufferringFromSuccess.meme), we can always defederate a smaller Lemmy/Piefed network and call it Fedi Classic.

I’ve used Reddit heavily for 16-17 years. The slide was slow and incremental and began at least 10 years ago. These are the reasons I would estimate have caused Reddit to become what it is now:

• Intentional political polarisation. The owners made their political affiliations clear over the years, and have not been shy about wielding their control. Every decision, from firing Victoria, to creating terms of service which excluded racism against white people, to hiring very left wing progressives as administrators and staff, to hiring Pao, to selective rule enforcement, has resulted in a place where even mild dissent is generally not tolerated. An echo-chamber in the truest sense. It’s so bad that it is now violent. We have cases of killers who became radicalised on Reddit. Something people may not know is that there is a very incesutous relationship between the moderators of the top subreddits and the owners and administrators. The larger subs are required to have administrators on the team, and they mostly control all of the large subreddits. It gets worse though, because the automated moderation system flags accounts which are banned by the moderators on those large subs. They get selectively tougher enforcement. Meaning that anyone who dares post in /r/Politics and doesn’t agree has all of their posts scrutinised to a much higher degree, and people are frequently banned from the entire website for innocuous reasons.

• The demographic became much younger over time. This is a product-led decision. Children are easier to manipulate and get addicted. They’re easier to control and indoctrinate. They’re an easy target to which to foment anger and “engagement.”

• The audience became much wider. Another product-led decision. The original demographic was male, 20-40, geek. Conversations were pretty mild, very respectful. With a much wider audience, all semblance of “Reddiquette” has disappeared. No one has a shared frame of reference anymore. The people who joined either didn’t care about civility, or were used to combative social spaces such as Twitter and Facebook. They brought those practises with them, and Reddit embraced it and encouraged it.

• Reddit embraced bots. They look great for advertising metrics. They foment that hate and engagement. I estimate that the majority of comments on Reddit are bots now. In some subreddits I would not be surprised if 90%+ were bots. Bots can’t be reasoned with. They’ll just keep spewing hate forever.

I honestly think Reddit is a dead man walking. Even the hyper partisan left wing people hate the site now. Everyone is waiting for an alternative. This is Digg all over again, but at a larger scale.

I think it was pretty clear it was enshittified.

By now there’s also more in form of description and research, it’s not just a negative word.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).

Reddit got bad long before they restricted API access. That's what was the final drop for many people, but it wasn't the beginning at all.

I agree that growing would be a benefit for Lemmy though. While I wouldn't dismiss the dangers of a growing community entirely, we can just defederate from or block problematic parts in theory. So I wouldn't say we're in quite the same danger as centralized platforms.

For me reddit got bad because of grouphink and terrible moderation (you were not nice to some idiot? banned for life!). I never used any 3rd party apps (nor the official app for that matter, only the website with adblock).

they ovvereached with thier AI-moderation/filtering bans, so now theres even less content. AI isnt finding reddit useful to scrape anymore, because they are getting Ai content instead.

What made reddit… reddit: The people running it, and a lot of the people using it.

The constant engagement farming rage bait and instant bans for the stupidest shit. Felt like i joined that one streamers sub who was controversial and got banned because of that in unrelated subs. Due to commerce reddit suddendly felt uneasy with non-mainstream opinions.

Reddit admins repeatedly asked mods how to make like for them better. And then repeatedly ignored almost every single answer they got, rolling out features nobody wanted and taking away things people used. It was the years and years and years of putting in hours and hours of time working against the enshittification that made me tired, and then it was the stupid fucking over-reaching AI moderation that caused me to leave after my accounts started being banned for no good reason with appeals failing.

It took far too long for them to drive me away, as I know it did for a lot of others.

We know… we were there.