It really fell off the rails when it became an imageboard moreso than a forum and link aggregator. It was all about the text, and so attracted those most willing to tolerate a wall of text.
Use Archive.org to compare 2008 to 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016 and onwards. The addition of thumbnails and gradual shift of the frontpage away from textual content and towards images is almost as remarkable as the increase in high-anxiety, anger and tribalism.
At some point sub-reddits were added, as well, which probably didn't help with the tribalism.
Ironically in my opinion subreddits are the only thing keeping the site useful at all. It’s all about curating a set of smaller subreddits targeted at your interests or frequented by people whose content you like. Beyond that it’s just terrible.
The amount of work the ask historians mods have to put in to make reddit function like people think it does/want it to is staggering. That team is basically doing a second full time job. I don’t know how they do it.
I'm sure it did not or maybe it was not enabled by default. I distinctly remember having to turn 'condensed view' back on because the thumbnails were taking so much vertical space.
edit: Just noticed who I replied to. I guess you would know better.
Of course, but the dominance of images over text was gradual. Compare archives of the front page in 2008, 2010 and so on. It is remarkable how the content focus shifts.
Use Archive.org to compare 2008 to 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016 and onwards. The addition of thumbnails and gradual shift of the frontpage away from textual content and towards images is almost as remarkable as the increase in high-anxiety, anger and tribalism.
At some point sub-reddits were added, as well, which probably didn't help with the tribalism.