Agreed. Over the past 2 years so many subreddits have devolved into what can be best described as doom scrolling ragebait, which is what reddit wants because it keeps eyeballs going for advertisers.

My city's subreddit when from "here's what's cool, going on, or new" to constant political posts. I'm Canadian and it's all but been determined that political forces are using AI posting to complain and point all problems at the current government (it's not clear who is doing it, whether far-right, foreign, or the opposition itself) on all Canadian focused subreddits.

There's also some curious stories about how a lot of the very good moderators of some of the larger ones like r/Canada, their provincial/city/regional counterparts, etc were all pushed out via various means.

The major subreddits are almost entirely bots as well. Try posting anything authentic and you'll be banned, regardless of how old your account is or how human you appear to be. It's entirely controlled, fake discussion pretending to be authentic due to the legacy of the site. The concept of moderators being volunteers from the community died off a long time ago, and there are zero safeguards to ensure they aren't captured entities from some organization or NGO; in fact, the architecture of the site itself doesn't even view this threat as a threat.

Remember, once considered a conspiracy theory, Ghlisane Maxwell was a powermod.

Maybe I've aged out of it or something but the userbase has gotten so much more annoying (and was already annoying when I finally started using it around 2010) over the last several years, that I've almost entirely quit it. I used to mod large subs, I started a company with a group of guys I met on Reddit (and we still have our own group chat), and its just completely lost all appeal to me. It's like every user is the annoying college freshman that thinks they're an expert on all things because of half a semester of intro physics.

But where? What spaces?

I know about wikia/fandom, discords (both as user hostile as reddit), or some ancient topical forums (neither small not thriving).

> lately Reddit has been feeling really like dead Internet though.

Saccharined killed. You used to be able to make some really vitriolic comments on most subs just for the lulz and only get downvoted to hell and back. But nowadays if you're not following the doxa you get perma-banned from some sub first then next day perma-banned from reddit itself. And if you comment on one of the main subs you go directly to reddit permaban.

reddit is a really weird website these days. the main subs push misinformation / ai generated garbage. the same posts are on every sub. the self post subs are almost 100% ai written. the comments which historically have been sometimes useful just feel hollow

I miss 2021-22 reddit. Seemed we finally went back to normal.