Do you watch all or popular, or just your subscribed feeds? I like browsing things when not logged on, and reddit certainly turned very political in the all/popular feeds you see by default. Before then they were mostly full of funny pictures, jokes and random rants about life.

Early reddit was very similar to HackerNews. One front page where users submitted interesting links and stories. Then slowly subreddits started to get introduced, like "/r/science", "/r/programming", and "/r/atheism". Already very early people didn't like this change and created /r/TrueReddit. Read their rules and you can see how similar to HN this is "only interesting stories", "do not editorialize the original title" etc. However even /r/TrueReddit shifted heavily towards politics (i.e. short by top -> all time and see which stories get most upvotes). After that /r/TrueTrueReddit for people who were trying to maintain the same spirit. But it is dying now more or less.

Many many small changes had to happen before it downgraded into what we see today [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Reddit

I don't know if the above commenter is talking about the same time period. However, the period around 2016 when Trump got elected revealed some odd decisions that Reddit had that it eventually needed to change. It's been a while, but this is what I remember:

How Reddit works is you have various subreddits about different topics. You can go to each subreddit individually to view the highest rated posts about that specific topic. However, most people don't do this, but rather go to reddit.com and see a feed of various subreddits combined. For active users this feed will be tailored to their choices, however, what to show users that are new or not logged in is a question that Reddit struggled with.

For a while, this was done by having some subreddits be chosen to be shown by default. Initially there were only a few, I think around 10-20, and they were handpicked. At some point more subreddits became default, I think it grew to 50-100 if I remember. However, this caused a lopsidedness where these few handpicked default subreddits had orders of magnitude more views than non-default ones, so Reddit was split into two worlds between popular default subreddits and niche unknown ones. Imagine a website where half of it was like Twitter and Facebook and half of it was like Hacker News.

To fix this, at some point they changed it to ALL subreddits being default. In other words, the most popular posts sitewide would reach the default feed, no matter which subreddit they were from. There was a NSFW filter, but other than that there were no controls at all. The people in change of Reddit at this time were very anti-censorship, to where they felt that there should be no moderation other than voting. Around this time Trump was elected and a certain subreddit that could charitably be described as frenzied for Trump started growing in popularity. As a result, a lot of their posts reached the front page of Reddit, and their posts were not just biased but cult like or even containing outright fake news.

Reddit eventually solved this with a feed called popular that was a middle ground, where instead of having a handful of default subreddits, it would be all subreddits minus those with extreme topics. Critics viewed it as censoring, and it was, but it stopped Reddit from sliding towards a 4chan like reputation, and I am confident the Reddit of today would have never been able to be mainstream without this type of change.

Reddit, ca. 2010, was a small community with mostly civil, but always adult discussion of topics, where people tended to try and understand each others. The term "circlejerk" was known, sure, but it was more a self-ironic observation of subcommunities (aka "subreddits") starting to diverge on a common viewpoint after a while. Bans were rare. We had side-wide charity activity (e.g. we bought some kid prosthetics his family could not afford). We had our little in-site activity (meet-a-redditor, around that time, secret santa started out). We had "important people" on the site as active redditors apparently out of their own drive, not being driven towards us in one-off events (prominently, Bill Gates and Arnold Schwarzenegger used to be somewhat active redditors).

Reddit took a first hit after the digg exodus, when it became a lot more about gaming - but we absorbed them, and eventually got to a somewhat acceptable place again.

Around 2014, "Chairman Pao" took over, and very soon, we had the influx of very left-wing, very college-liberal minded people, and stuff went downhill. Suddenly, it was all about politics, about Hillary vs. Trump, it was all about LBGT, it was all about what it meant to have free speech. People started getting banned for activity on other subreddits. ("You posted on /r/gunmaking? You are no longer welcome on /r/todayilearned"). Of course, that led to an immediate reaction from the "opposing" side, whoever was not college-liberal left moved to become increasingly right-wing (I've observed such an unconscious shift in myself, when on Reddit - and that has affected my thought in general), some extremely so. Which attracted ... more right-wing extremists to come in. Reddit reacted to that with force against most of these right-wing subreddits, banning and deleting whole communities (some are allowed to stay around, for the time being, most likely to act as honeytraps).

But the Overton window has moved radically to the left (to the point where fantasising about mass murder of the affluent part of society is not only tolerated, but sometimes encouraged). Discussion about "neutral" topics still exist, in niches - but often get poisoned by people trying to find fault in other people's browsing history.

Reddit is a cesspool, its golden age is over. If you wanted to salvage it, you probably should hide user comment history from the public, you should limit the number someone can moderate to maybe five to avoid "moderation cartels", and you should install a team that objectively enforce the reddiquette.

(I'm a redditor for 14 years now, but rarely go there anymore)