[someonebaggy]

The flip side of this is that for many years it's been basically impossible for a real person to convince Reddit to let them have an account. They track so many signals and if they don't like a single one or a combination, you get shadowbanned - I've tried it a few times since then on different computers on different networks with different email addresses, and I concluded they must have an extremely specific idea of what a new user does and everything else is spamming. For example if I post a few comments within a few hours of signing up, I was always shadowbanned. Because that's what a new user does, you see.

I stopped trying to have a Reddit account in about 2024 when the platform was too obviously enshittified, with no content of any value whatsoever remaining on it.

[EA-3167]

Once Discord started taking off I was much happier returning to the chatrooms I started with (on IRC), without any algorithm attempting to maximize your engagement. It's much less useful as a resource that grows over time, but the value of something like that has been slashed and burned by LLM's anyway.

In the end the biggest hurdle to getting an account on Reddit at this point is why you'd bother.

[TFNA]

For the last several years, I’ve created a new Reddit account, posted heavily, and then deleted it when I felt I needed a social-media break. Rinse and repeat. I’ve never had problems creating those new accounts or having them banned. You just need to verify your signup with some new email address, at some domain that isn’t already a known throwaway-email domain, and accept that some subs won’t show your comments until your account is a couple of weeks old.

But I definitely agree with you that the platform is finished now, even smaller subs that aren’t drawing so much surreptitious spam. The problem is that even if one uses Old Reddit, the vast majority of other posters are using the app. That tends to discourage substantial discussion or community, in favour of daft 140-character shit comments.

[kps]

When I become a dotcom^H^H^H^H^H^H AI zillionaire, I'll start a web-only platform that blocks mobile user agents. (If you can work around that, you've passed the entry gate.)