I go back to Reddit now from time to time. Mostly to ask specific questions in communities that are niche and don’t exist on here. They are the only good interactions I see that are just as good as here. Elsewhere it’s just different. I’ve not been able to put my finger on why, myself like. But it’s definitely not the same.

I see more racism, sexism and other bigotry than before. Although there certainly was a lot of that back then as well. Also bots.

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

The only places there that haven’t changed are the tiny game subs, to my limited willingness to use the site. I have checked the niche subs I used to moderate, and all but one is swamped with bullshit. Even that one has changed some. The only ones of those unchanged are the ones I had set to private ages before spez threw his little hissy-fit. The ones that were public are either dead, botted, or just unchecked insanity with bad moderation. Spam everywhere.

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.

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

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

Yeah, feels like most of the big and medium subs have devolved into karma farms. Zero substance.

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.

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.

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.

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.