Check out https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods. It's dead now, but the number of popular posts removed for arbitrary reasons is insane. According to the graph on the front page, something went wrong in mid-2017, because that's when the number of post removals suddenly accelerated.
That was when they decided the 2016 election could never be allowed to happen again, and “liberal” folks decided free speech (rather hilariously in a dark way) was a “danger to democracy”.
They then proceeded to call anyone who disagreed with this sentiment a “Russian bot”. I remember getting banned from certain subreddits just because I was guilty of the crime of posting in r/TheDonald (not even voicing support!)
Oh yea I've experienced that before by posting on r/subredditdrama. I was then banned from a relationship sub, a eli5 sub and another sub. Ironically I was posting to correct some bad information that was shared, but it didn't matter.
the mods abused the sticky functionality to get posts pushed to the front page for a long time. other subreddits were tired of t_d users brigading. they spread misinformation on purpose.
Engage in good faith in online spaces or get banned. hn is useful because it is tightly moderated.
the auto-ban of users that post in no-no subreddits was a reaction to the continued lack of action on reddit's part.
I remember that one day the frontpage was exclusively t_d posts. Insane stuff. Shortly after, they changed the algorithm. That was the day reddit officially jumped the shark.
I understand why they did it, but reddit was not the same afterwards. The content got stale and boring, astroturfed to hell, and that's without mentioning the clique of moderators pushing a specific narrative on all subs and the horrible, horrible, horrible redesigns that kept getting pushed in increasingly hostile ways.
I am honestly surprised, and saddened, that reddit still hasn't gone out the way digg did, but that's probably because there is no good alternative yet...
The only way to "enjoy" reddit is with old.reddit.com and sorting by "rising" instead of "hot"... or "controversial", if you have the guts.
Reddit will never die like Digg did, but also it already has. When Digg died, it was still primarily a news site, and the community was smaller and more cohesive.
Reddit is now what Forumer used to be and a less reactionary NextDoor if you're in at least a medium-sized city. Today there was a loud boom in my city and the first place I heard about it was the local subreddit. Digg never had that. Nor did it have the special-interest boards (including pornography). Reddit also functions as the best independent product reviews site — my back owes plenty to /r/Mattress.
But as a news and politics site, it's basically dead. If you use any reasonably independent subreddits, people will be talking about how awful the "defaults" are. People prefer Discord for video games and they join filter-bubble communities for politics. The all-time top posts on /r/news are mostly more than two years old. The same is true of /r/worldnews and /r/politics — in the former case, some minor Hungarian drama from years ago outshines every single thread about the Russo-Ukrainian War.
> I remember that one day the frontpage was exclusively t_d posts. Insane stuff. Shortly after, they changed the algorithm. That was the day reddit officially jumped the shark.
This was definitely a turning point of Meme War I.
>Memetic warfare on the part of 4chan and r/The_Donald sub-reddit is widely credited with assisting Donald Trump in winning the election in an event they call 'The Great Meme War'. According to Ben Schreckinger, "a group of anonymous keyboard commandos conquered the internet for Donald Trump—and plans to deliver Europe to the far right."
