> taken over by politics spam

Not in my experience. You just have to subscribe to subreddits that don't have a political tilt. On rare occasions some subreddits go dark or sticky something political, but I'd hardly call that a take over.

Imgur is in the same boat. It was a younger, energetic social network and the comments were mostly whimsical. I used to enjoy perusing its frontpage. Now it's heavy on political spam, talking points and general political propaganda, more or less cloning the descent you see on mainstream Reddit (plenty of niche subs are still great and mostly free of politics). I think it largely mirrors the manic obsession you see in certain parts of the US culture to hyper focus on politics 24/7.

I have a 14+ year old Reddit account, and that platform was always astroturfed.

No they're not usually, except a few communities

Reddit’s audience is old; it’s a bunch of millennials and older gen Z. And the kids don’t really use the comments on Reddit, they just yoink memes and throw them on whatever social media platform their friends use. The gen z’s I know through the LGBT community couldn’t give a shit less about politics.

Text as a medium is rapidly falling out of favor unless it’s for purely informational purposes. I read an article this morning about how the book publishing industry is all but dead because nobody is buying books anymore. Newspapers are largely dead, and the ones that still exist have pivoted hard to video or metatextual content.

Text doesn’t sell valuable ads and reading requires your full attention, and that is in direct competition with social media. It’s why banner ads were never really effective and the big ad revenue shift only happened after video ads became viable (and made YouTube unwatchable).