[llambda]

I stopped reading Reddit at the beginning of last year: there was a clear shift in demographic that wasn't something I found to be positive. The preference had seemed to become for short, trite, flippant comments that would illicit a slew of puns. Increasingly the richness of content of submissions had dried up. Of course I was told by my friends that I should just read subreddits and ignore the garbage. But even then, the culture had changed. So ultimately it wasn't for me. Needless to say, I'm hardly a loss to Reddit's bottom-line in the scheme of things and they're probably better off in the mainstream in that regard.

[bh42222]

I stopped reading reddit long before you stopped. Quite a bit later, I slowly came back by being very selective about my subreddits. I think others might have done the same, because I've definitely been able to create a reddit very much like I remember it long before it got so popular. (Good god, does this post make me sound like an uber-hipster, or what!)

[maleadt]

But you're right about the subreddits, and this is one of the more important features which manages to keep acquainted users from leaving the site, even if they are tired of the now 4chan-esque frontpage.

[fuzionmonkey]

I remember first starting to read reddit probably about a year or so before digg v4. Originally I thought the site style was boring, but I kept coming back because there was always fresh content.

I noticed that after digg v4 things started to downhill. in the last few months it has gotten dramatically worse.

unfunny memes get beaten to death. Rage comics, etc. Two years ago there wasn't that crap. I feel like memes are taking over, and regular comments and submissions are forced into banality when they would be better without the old, beaten-to-death meme.

there's still a lot of good stuff but there's now a sea of horrible content to sift through.

[llambda]

And just to add to that, I feel like the subreddit mechanism is a horribly fragmented and inefficient way of maintaining quality; even as an experienced user I had trouble finding the richness of quality I was looking for.