They don’t care about the old guard of mostly geeks and techies. With Covid and moments of Twitter/tumblr exodus, Reddit has picked up a ton of users that just want generic social media.
It’s basically just a global slightly more news text-centric TikTok feed. Serving up slop that’s just tasty enough to keep you hooked.
My home page turned into this at some point in the past, after which I unsubscribed from a bunch of dopamine based subs and subscribed to more substantial subs of my interest. That really helped, but over time the rot set in again as a few subs grew in size and turned into a meaningless dopamine fest (probably fuelled by karma hungry bots / farms).
Based on this experience I won't be surprised at all if your prediction became true. It is as if that's the natural end state and it requires constant effort (org, mods, community) to steer away from it.
This was exactly my experience too. Their app is also optimized toward that end, ad-riddled, laggy, and privacy-invasive (the green online dot, bombarded my pi-hole with requests). Their web is the same, just pushing for the app and slow. I have not been on reddit on the past few days, and perhaps this is my chance to put my time into better use, including more HN again.
The constant of reddit is that user protests come in waves again and again. If this wave will be over soon, the "geeks and techies" will be focused on polishing the alternatives. Even if this wave doesn't break reddits back, the next wave of user protests will have polished alternatives (due to the current influx of users and their demands) with way less friction ready.
It’s basically just a global slightly more news text-centric TikTok feed. Serving up slop that’s just tasty enough to keep you hooked.