11 years on reddit and seeing its long slow decline its just sad. A return to the basics was very necessary. Removing subs from r/all, messing with the voting, "new" reddit, a clamp down on content...it just kept getting worse and worse. As long as I could use RIF and old.reddit it was fine, but the writing is on the wall at this point.
While most of their users are used to the newer layout from other social media, my goal was always to see the most number of posts I could on a single page and have a clean ad-free experience. Lemmy seems to get this
The statement from r/watchredditdie when they closed the sub really put things in perspective for me.
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have gone so far as to renege on their promise of listing Aaron Swartz among Reddit, Inc's founders. Such an egregious breach of contract - only performed once their agreed-upon co-founder no longer walked the earth - could only be carried out by immoral individuals acting in fundamental bad faith. In this way and so many others, Reddit is dead.
If true, that actually speaks volumes. Like what kind of guy removes a dead man, at some point revered, from the list of co-founders. What do you lose by not doing it? What did you win by doing it? I mean, the odds are you lost more than anything. Besides, he should have been your partner. Even if you did for the cash, what about all the moments you had with him? Was Aaron such a piece that you'd rather have him erased?
Aaron Swartz will always be the real spiritual founder of what Reddit was at its best for me. Huffman will be the fool that didn't understand the ethos of it and drove it into the ground in his greed.
There was never serious competition to threaten Reddit before. Voat was the closest, but when legitimate redditfugees got there it was already full of a critical mass of Nazis (actual Nazis, not “everyone I don’t like is a Nazi”) and people who thought spamming slurs was peak free speech. Not exactly a solid foundation for popular new site.
In that case, I think the reddit administration did a good job of excising the people it didn't want, letting them take root elsewhere before the main mass went to check that place out, and letting that main mass come right back.
At the time, I thought it was a calculated and intelligent move on their part, fully intentional.
After what we're seeing now, I think maybe they lucked out.
I guess it's some sort of Hanlon's Inverse Corollary: Never attribute to intelligence what can be adequately explained by dumb luck.