Hasn't Reddit always been a laughing stock, even when compared to Discord?
Not quite. I'm not exactly an expert on all the major bullet points of their history. I'm going to post stuff that's not in the OP of this thread, and this will be long. I'm trying to get some important info here, with some help from Grok:
- It was founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian while they were still students at UVA.
- There was no concept of "subreddits" - everything went onto the main page until 2008, when subreddits (their name for sections) were created, letting users create their own communities about their interests.
- In 2006, they were acquired by Conde Nast, which gave them more money for development, and growth. The real secret sauce to their growth, though...
- The fall of Digg. It was created in 2004, and was a social news website. People could digg (upvote) or bury (downvote) content. Sounds familiar, right? Well, in 2010, they redesigned their website and got a very poor reception from their users. Many jumped ship to Reddit since, by that point, it was basically what Digg should have been.
- That isn't to say that Reddit didn't have its faults. One hall of shame moment from early Reddit was the existence and support they had for r/Jailbait - that was a sub made for sharing suggestive or revealing pictures of underage girls. There were other subreddits like that. Hell, even after it got shut down 2011, there was still shit like r/candidfashionpolice (voyeur pictures of women just walking around in the streets), and others that I can't recall off the top of my head. Not everyone was pro r/Jailbait but there was enough defense of it to raise eyebrows. CNN even reported on the subreddit.
- Over the 2010s, they had other hall of shame moments. You can search r/MuseumOfReddit for that. I like r/askreddit too - that's one sub where to this day, I can still find some decent discussions, like this one where they criticize the democratic party from 17 days ago. Anyways, hall of shame: trying to find the Boston Bomber from 2013 and pinning the blame on the wrong guy. The post that led to the real life tragedy of a woman killing her children out of spite (2016). CarlH, a programmer who seemed nice and had a subreddit called carlhprogramming, which is surprisingly still up. He was found out to be a literal child rapist, making cp of his daughter. Carl Herold killed himself in an alabama jail cell, iirc. Ellen Pao, oh my fucking god, that useless whore of a CEO they had. They had a ton of illegal subreddits until she was gone, like one about shoplifting. r/FatPeopleHate (lol) was banned just before she resigned in June 2015 (she left by July). r/CoonTown was a racist subreddit that didn't die until a month after she was replaced. r/beatingwomen was another one that didn't get banned until she left.
- The big fuckup from Ellen Pao's time was that she fired Victoria Taylor, the director of talent that managed AMA's ("ask me anything" threads). A lot of users like to say that this is the reason why AMA's are often shit or bland these days.
In spite of all that...there's still a lot of useful threads and the more nuanced takes on why certain people suck. The Joel Osteens, Robert Kiyosakis, Oprah Winfreys, etc. of this world that don't get nearly enough hate imo, get plenty of it on reddit. Over the years, though, big subreddits got radicalized and numerous of them became blatant lefty circlejerks. r/AdviceAnimals was embarrassing during the election last year. Fucking embarrassing, they were eating up a lot of Kamala's shit campaign. r/HobbyDrama used to be a favorite of mine, with threads that were as informative as well done OPs on here. r/Argentina feels like one of the few places were you can criticize lefty politics in the country, whereas other subs (hi, worldnews) have very silly "let me tell you about your country" energy when it comes to the country. It's not without its flaws, they also like to get stupidly edgy on that subreddit.
That brings up another plot point to reddit's story: the banning of r/The_Donald in 2020. Explicitly, it was banned due to breaking rules on harassment and bullying, so in theory they'd fall under the same umbrella as r/fatpeoplehate - Reddit was also cracking down more on hate speech, and had updated their content policy that year, leading to the ban of 2000 subreddits.
As we reach 2025, we can see the current Reddit moderation
slapping r/whitepeopletwitter on the wrist, even though they have been caught straight up wishing and cheering on the idea of murdering people they don't like. This site has become a clusterfuck, as you can tell. On the other hand coomers love Reddit, and it's not hard to see why, there's a lot of subs for them to choose from. And they don't have to worry about being astroturfed with politics in most of those subs.
Hell, some subreddits are basically like Kiwifarms threads. Let's Talk Bam reminds me of our Bam Margera thread. r/SamandTolki was basically a gaming lolcow thread, mainly about Narcissa Wright and Boogie before its ban. It can be a very informative and fun site. Finding those comfy subs may have gotten harder, though.