I stopped having an account at Reddit before the API changes, but there was a change in the way I saw the site over time. I'd be surprised if over 30% of its traffic is legitimate, organic, people just wanting to share things and talk about their interests. So much of many comment threads these days is about getting high scores on algorithms, and there's a lot of copying of high-scoring comments, clear attempts to change community narratives or sentiment regarding certain topics or brands, etc.<p>Digg, Reddit, and more have proven: a truly public discussion board will be taken over by business behavior unless it is strictly prohibited and enforced.<p>A decent number of people saw the writing on the wall that they didn't own the spaces that they socialized in, and sought something more distributed, with the Fediverse. It's a step in the right direction, but the extant focus on re-posting and updoots/downdoots still retains a lot of bullshit from social media that'll carry over just fine in terms of social behavior.<p>Reddit burned me out on any sort of website that has scoring or other perverse incentives to mess up the intent of whatever community. Groups who are earnest and savvy will host forum software and not social media software. Though one socializes on a forum, the way that you do so and the mechanics available separate them and allow you to focus on the topicality instead of how many updoots one gets. That design decision prevents gaming the forum, and in doing so gets rid of 'fake' engagement. For instance, why do we allow up and down votes without corresponding messages/reasons? I care much less about the metrics of group sentiment and would rather see <i>why</i> they feel a certain way.<p>Take a moment to actually <i>read</i> a Reddit thread, or a Youtube comments page, or any other generally accessible place to chat. Most of it is trash, a lot of it repeats itself, a lot of bots, misinformation, the works.<p>The media itself is fake. The things that get posted on places are <i>meant</i> to be posted places. It's all a fake social game. At least StumbleUpon, in its early hey day, exposed me to new and fun places on the Web. That atmosphere is dead in modern social media.<p>Bird's eye view, not much has changed. But Reddit has removed their awards system and Premium doesn't seem to have value. The bot problem hasn't gotten any better; rate-limiting just means they need more accounts. I visit there sometimes out of old habit, but I don't find anything fun anymore.<p>Lemmy has potential but I feel it's basically the same norms we saw on Reddit, depending on the instance.<p>Sure I'm on HN and it might barely qualify as social media, but I don't exactly fit in here. This is sort of a "last earnest effort" to participate somewhere on the Internet that isn't my own self-hosted services that use open or federated protocols.