reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).

the reason why this happened is because reddit is a for-profit company and tries to extract money out of the userbase, at the expense of the users.

another example of a bad decision that reddit made was to push a lot of ragebait ("Am I The Asshole?") because company shareholders want to see "engagement numbers" go up, and if somebody writes an angry reply to a post, that's "engagement". but it makes you angry at the stupidity of the "Asshole", so it makes your day worse. that is another example how reddit makes money at the expense of the users.

size (number of monthly active users) is not what made reddit bad. commercialization is.

we should probably get rid of the "don't make lemmy grow, it will ruin the platform if we grow" idea.

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[–] OctopusNemeses@lemmy.world 6 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

There was a quiet exodus during the_donald era. That whole time from 2016 - 2020 was very strange. Nobody talks about it. Except for the minority of us from the before times.

For reddit corporate there was a serendipitous confluence of events.

Right wing US politics trolls caused a quiet exodus.
A pandemic happened causing everyone to be stuck at home doomscrolling.
Reddit was doing a relaunch, with a new site design and official app.
They were preparing to IPO.

Basically reddit corporate got a free reset. One that Digg could have only dreamed of. Much of the old unprofitable userbase left. Ragebaiting trolls overran the platform. Fresh userbases flooded into the site. Social media psychological manipulation/addiction mechanisms had a field day on those unsuspecting doomscrollers.

You old timers ever notice how reddit's demise is a perpetually sliding window? You can tell when someone started using reddit based on when they think it was good and when it went bad.

Most users today talk about relaunch/redesign era as the good times. They think only relatively recently has it turned bad. None them have any clue about the pre-2020 era because they had no clue about reddit before.

All that being said. I don't think it's only commercialization that killed it. The type of users killed it too. That isn't mutually exclusive from userbase size.

Commercialization relies on engagement tricks like ragebait. That requires users who will engage with that too. The old reddit userbase was more skeptical and cognizant of commercialization tactics. The userbase today doesn't hate it. Some even seem to relish in it.

They like the tabloid posts. They like the emotional clickbait. They like to gossip. They like the drama.

[–] LadyButterfly@reddthat.com 1 points 3 hours ago

There's academic articles proving negative posts get more interaction. Some people just want to fight, they love the negativity. Life's hard enough ffs. It's disappointing cos it used to be a great place to hang out

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 1 points 4 hours ago

politics any of the variant subs, and news subs, is where people get most if not all of the bans. the faux ragebaits are aita, and dinnerdiaries.