[ayngg]

I think there are 2 major problems at play.

First, I have no idea what Reddit the company has been doing since basically every addition to the site in over a decade has been garbage and has made the site worse to use. The site is basically unusable without the old.reddit.com style, their media hosting is worse than imgur or any of the other alternatives, their app and mobile experience is worse than any number of free alternatives, and besides that I don't know what else the have done except gamify posts with their awards system.

The second problem is how communities on Reddit and the internet as a whole are structured, incentivized and evolve. So many of these communities are unable to check themselves (which generally requires very good moderation), and with incentive structures like upvotes and awards, posting is gamified where people post things they think others will approve of and will reward, which causes communities to become monocultures as everyone else just leaves, is downvoted into oblivion or just banned from the subreddit. These communities basically become filled with people who have the same opinions and circlejerk about them in ways that affirm their opinions and disparage ones that oppose them, causing them to slowly become detached from reality. It creates a community of people who basically become unable to discuss things with people who don't share the same opinions, which then carries over to interactions outside of those monocultures. Lots of these people just dont have the ability to even talk to others with differing viewpoints now.

The best communities and best conversations I have had online have been those that offer a lot of off topic discussions within interest based communities. Support group/ identity based communities need very strong moderation because they are much more susceptible to "radicalization" if that is the correct term.