I hear a lot of people talk like this, and I understand that reddit has huge traffic numbers. However, for me Reddit peaked in interesting content around 2013, and I stopped daily browsing in 2015. Sometimes some subreddits have interesting posts, but interesting content is far from the norm. Now each subreddit feels like it is having the same discussion again and again, and the median post is a meme or some chat-gpt generated text dump. As Reddit became more and more popular the most upvoted posts became more and more mass-appeal and easily digested content.
Other platforms have taken it's place as where the truly interesting discussions are happening. Twitter and Discord being the biggest two.
But thats not what the reddit owners care about. They are happy people like you leave, you are hard to monetize and block ads. The people who look at the front page today and say this is great? They don't block ads. They don't use old reddit. They don't realize when they are engaging with a shill post. Reddit wants proportionally more of them and less of you, and they are winning.
That only works to a point I think. If your forum devolves to only having the easily duped people, it becomes a lot less interesting overall (since the content is from the people) and even those people leave.
I have observed a recurring pattern of "this popular place is doing something I don't like! Let's all move to a less popular place, that will show them!" Time and time again, the people who made the move learned that they were the minority in what they didn't like. Also, while the old place might have a greater variety of people (good and bad), the new place is often filled with many people who were angry about the old place (maybe mostly "good", but makes a lot of angry posts).
So now, people who are at this newer, possibly better, but quieter and angrier place, they have to wonder if they made a good move. Sometimes, with enough patience, the new place do eventually turned out to be just as great. But usually my observation is that people just give up and leave, possibly returning to the old (still popular) place.
Another example being of X to the fediverse. So many people switched over, made not being on X their entire identity, freaked out when the place wasn't as sanitized as X and eventually just went back.
I tried moving to Lemmy, but turns out that the only people there are other techies who are mostly interested in techie topics (and I already have HN for that).
If you want a broader perspective or you want to discuss non-techie topics, Reddit is still the place to be, for better or worse.
Other platforms have taken it's place as where the truly interesting discussions are happening. Twitter and Discord being the biggest two.