this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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Privacy
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I think there was a big shift for reddit in 2016 after they bought (and then shut down..) AlienBlue and then launch their official app. That moment it felt like when the number of users just exploded, but with that, the quality of posts (and average age of the user) dropped.
Lemmy/the fediverse reminds me of 2010-2015 reddit (which is a good thing!)
I remember when Reddit was run out of spez's Somerville apartment on a little PC. No subreddits, just one top page. Terrible performance and no users. Everyone was at either Slashdot or Digg. Even Kuro5hin by then was dead. Reddit beat Digg because Digg got stupid and abused their community. Reddit is a million times worse now than Digg ever was.
Yup! I was a part of the mass Digg exodus.
I figured that would happen again with reddit, but to my disappointment the internet is a much different place than it used to be.
There was a competitor of Digg to flee to. Reddit, and the other social media platforms, solved that problem with anticompetitive practices to prevent a migration they previously benefitted from.
What anticompetitive practices? I figure it is more just a matter of userbase inertia: they already have the huge user base, so other forum user bases are small which makes people not want to migrate there.
Agreed. I remember leaving MySpace for Facebook (shit I even remember Xanga before MySpace).
At some point, it felt like the internet just got smaller, became 5 websites. And on those 5 websites, you'd find something like: a picture of a tweet posted to reddit and the tweet is about an instagram post"
Really disheartening as someone who came up with the "wild west" internet (which definitely had its issues, but it felt like human issues, not corporate issues)
Back when Reddit was funny and not a bot hive
I remember /r/AskReddit being THE spot, and it was great to read on the go since it was just text. All the novelty accounts were awesome, RamblesOffTopic being a favorite of mine haha.
...and r/conspiracy was 80% stuff like birds ain't real and the rest I always assumed was people posting ironically... now I'm not so sure that that was an accurate assessment.
and r/F7U12. It wasn't just a meme it was an entire meme language, kids these days with their gifs and their template sites... smhing my head