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.
It really depends on what sub(s) you visit. Some subs didn't have a lot of mobile users to begin with, so they didn't see much change in their core active members.
The default sort/filter for the front page there is trash now. I typically see the same things hovering there for days.
Yeah, if I go to Reddit I go for something specific, e.g. discussion about certain sci-fi series, which is definitely more lively there than here, simply because of higher user count.
I only use it for /r/nfl now, that community is great at creating memes and posting highlights as soon as it happens and I still visit a few niche subreddits but they too got even smaller, probably a lot of us switched to just lurking instead of actively participating
My country's sub got taken by a pro-government group, I used it to see the news and know what was happening there but now you can't find any news that criticize the government or that show the country in a bad manner. We had a meme sub and that was taken over too so it became trash
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.
Large subs are unreadable bot garbage. Small subs are still the same questions that have been answered a million times over and over. New OC is so rare that it gets drowned in low effort shit posts. At this point I don’t even open a tab anymore, just scroll lemmy till there’s no ‚new‘ stuff and then carry on with the day
Like you I left in June 2023. Haven't been back though.
They drove away a ton of active users with the whole API thing. Makes sense conversation isn't the same there anymore. The people posting and commenting left with the apps that make it convenient to... post and comment. Such an own goal by reddit.
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.
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.
Reddit hasn't felt the same for me since around 2021/22.
At some point it stopped being a platform for niche communities to come together and became a cesspool of corporate/government astroturfing and karma farm bots with a side of real people.
I was on reddit since 2011 or so and in the beginning it was awesome and funny and first was a thing and it was like a big clubhouse where everyone was chill for the most part. Then influencers.really picked up steam and the corps started doing their subtle ads and baby Yoda and then the bots came and toxicity and the Donald and the rest of the cesspool exploded.
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