It’s a damn shame because it’s original design, back when Aaron Schwartz was still alive, was a good source of online communities.

Things really started going to shit around 2015, it got too popular. The success of the_donald prompted changes in the suggestion algorithm, interface changes optimized for tracking and advertising, and top down heavy enforcement censorship.

With RES, one could see how many upvotes and how many downvotes a comment received. This got killed in the redesign due to “advertiser pressure”. But the real reason is that it manufactures consent. A net score of -10 gets hidden, but it could have been +490/-500 which showed that nearly half of voters agreed with the comment.

By hiding this away, the culture of Reddit shifted across the board. The ability to see dissent was further obfuscated. It becomes more of a hive mind.

r/AMA became purely a promotional tool when they sacked the lady who would work with celebrities to interact with the community, which further stripped any sort of culture in favor of advertising.

What started as a platform dedicated to free speech, was now “quarantining” subreddits, killed the warrant canary, and banning “hate subreddits”. Spez was shown to edit user comments at the backend.

Communities could be killed by featuring them. A mass influx of new users would undermine the culture that had grown organically. Not everything had to be banned to be killed, it just had to be exposed to the entirety of the user base at once.

The algorithm of the front page had been commandeered into a propaganda tool, bringing people in with a sprinkling of interesting content in between “political humor” talking points.

It is now completely gamed by governments and corporations. It’s Pravda with upvotes.