I posted this because I did not have words to my thoughts and hoped that it would spark a conversation to help me put the thoughts and words together. It did; goobster fucking nailed it. There are two reddits: the community that posts, and the admins. Notice what is really telling about all the reddit articles of late? No tech stuff. No articles on how they are improving the server responses, or better mod tools or anything that relates to the bare technology of the platform. it's all crap like this. If I was a conspiracy guy I'd say they are intentionally trying to kill the site because they hate the user base.

The explanation I was looking for is that reddit is now tainted from the goon invasions, the 4chan invasions, the fatpeoplehate and jailbait debacles etc... people who want to have neat conversations are not advertising their reddit presence like they did 5-6 years ago, if they ever did. And instead of focusing on modding tools that have been promised for years and other ways of helping the volunteers who help curate the content that generates eyeballs they rolled out an image hosting site, native ads, IAMA monetization and increased user tracking.

This exact same thing happened to Digg. The news stopped being about the site and instead became about the people running it, then the place tanked. Reddit is too big to tank like Digg did, and there is a much younger user base that is willing to put up with a lot more than guys like me. It's like watching a dumpster fire where the dumpster is filled with all your mementos and photo albums.