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.

I don’t know, size made it pretty bad. Subreddits with hundreds of thousands or more users create environments where no one is trying to have a discussion. People are just vying for attention. That creates an environment where comments are either all jokes, or all snark. It’s really, really hard to have anything that resembles a human experience in a place like that. People stop recognizing each other as people, and just treat everyone as an audience.

That makes for a pretty bad experience.

No, what made Reddit bad was incivility, bots, trite comments, and theme accounts (and my axe!). It was massively popular, which exacerbated this stuff, and it incentivized upvotes.

Lemmy has upvotes but people seem less interested in them.

Here, we have the ability to mute toxic groups (defederate). We are decentralized, so it’s not just one dickhead in charge. Our users are, for the most part, civil and somewhat intelligent and funny.

I was with Reddit from 2012-2015ish and then lurking on and off until the API shit storm, and we are nothing like Reddit in my opinion - not that that was the intent of the original post but still

I see the point but I don’t necessarily agree. Before the intense commercialization Reddit had definitely changed for the worse for me because of the influx of people.

I stopped talking about Linux because Winbros would brigade me. I stopped talking about politics because I would be brigaded by western/capitalist bros. The discussions also got a lot worse over time and nuanced opinion was almost always down voted and brigaded.

I fear the same would happen for lemny if we suddenly had a hundred million users. Having a good community is desirable, but having a ton of people not so much so.

We know… we were there.

Brute force moderation is what killed it IMHO. Same shit that as happening to .world

Size and commercialisation generally go hand in hand. After all, how do you keep something running with infinite users submitting infinite content for free?

This is a big issue for everyone, it’s important that the fediverse understands that size might some day increase the importance of sensible business models or proactive funding initiatives to counter the growth. This doesn’t mean harmful profit models necessarily, but it does mean keeping revenues under control for individually run nodes or for archiving services for old fediverse domains that might not exist forever.