As for other websites, Lemmy and other federated aggregators have gained a bit of a foothold.
Post quality also declined after the 2017 redesign. The old design had a sidebar where subreddits kept a FAQ and wiki. Today, the same questions get asked again and again on many subreddits. Mods can't lock those posts and direct the author to the FAQ, because most users can't even see the FAQ. Mods who try to ensure a firm hand regularly get excoriated by the community, even by regulars on the sub, as "gatekeepers".
Communities are defined by the content contributors first and for most. That's something Reddit forgot.
Reddit started with a little bit of modding to clean up the mess which is always needed (how it works on HN). Then every year it seemed to grow and grow, mods were now self-annoited editors of their own pet magazines. A hundred plus mods were added to major subs, where in some 50% of comments can get removed in major threads. r/science has many many threads where 75% of comments were removed, almost entirely as they didn't fit some idea of what should be discussed, what was acceptable.
That's a big difference from RTFM culture on forums.
You write about developments on major subs, but those are just that, the major subs. Niche hobby subs, on the other hand, often don't see the level of moderation they actually need in order to retain knowledgeable contributors. People with a certain level of proficiency in a hobby will bail if the discussion is predominantly newbie questions or repetitive arguments.
I actually don't like locking posts either; the concept is fine, but in execution it felt more like a band-aid for when a moderator was tired of moderating, often because of 1-2 specific chains of comment and everything else was perfectly civil. Rotten apple ruins the barrel, and the feeling of mod laziness means they throw out the apples and the barrel instead of pruning the fruit.
>You write about developments on major subs, but those are just that, the major subs.
which is what proportionately most people will experience. moderating 100 people and 10m people are different problem spaces, similar to sorting 100 items and 10m items. They need different solutions and approaches to perform them optimally even if the end result is the same.
In one of the craft based subs I moderate (5m subs - reasonably sized one), it's not so much the quality of posts has dropped, it's that the quantity has dropped, and dropped significantly. This seems to directly translate to garbage posts getting a lot more visibility and sticking around for a lot longer. The good quality posts are still there, but proportionally the garbage is much more visible now.
This is enough of a problem that subscribers have been complaining about it. Not much can be done until (and only if) the number of actual contributors begins to rise again.
On the other hand, I also run a tiny local city sub (maybe 20k ppl) - the number of posts has been steadily growing. I can't work that one out.
Local subs growing despite power users vacating kind of lines up with this too — casual users seem more likely to treat Reddit like one of the bigger platforms like Facebook, seeking out subreddits that are more broadly appealing or based around locality rather than interest-based subreddits.
Mine's gone from 1-1.5k to 2-400 posts a day.
reddit wants to jump on to the low-effort click-drawing content bandwagon - whilst good for their numbers in short term I think low term it's not going to be great. I know for my sub, the discord community has now taken off and is probably more vibrant than the sub currently is.
I personally wrote a userscript to wipe every post comment I've ever made, and have limited my usage to a few particular subs that I still lurk (/r/LocalLLaMA in particular) just bc Lemmy still doesn't seem to have a comparable level of activity.
Speaking of which I'm still trying to sort out the situation involving which instances federate with which, and where to actually set up a primary account, and what the interop situation with different Fediverse platforms is even like in general for that matter.
Those that replaced it with Lemmy, and those that took it as a moment to kick a habit.
I think the latter is the larger group.
Sure, foldables exist, but they're still out of a typical user's price range and are more fragile than either of the things they're replacing. And while personally I more just lost track of it because my last couple of devices have been carrier-locked initially, custom ROMs have gotten to be substantially more of a pain in the ass to daily-drive. Not only has Google opted to mostly let the core applications rot in favor of ones that depend on the Google Play libs, but SafetyNet is now being used for everything from DRM to anti-cheat. (Not that I should be picking up a Fate: G/O habit anyway, but still.)
I do have hope for things in this space to get interesting again -- I think the full potential of GKIs is more of a long-term bet, and I think the landscape for Android on larger screens is a lot better this time around -- but I'm also just as interested in any way I can get my old devices running Linux at this point instead. (I am aware of PostmarketOS, but my OP7T doesn't have a port yet, and mainlining a device is as daunting a research dive as it is fascinating.)
To more directly answer your question though, you might want to check Lemdroid (lemdro.id) if you haven't already.
Yeah, I can see the average quality has been going down. Also I've felt less enthusiastic about contributing. I just won't bother submitting articles, writing a more insightful comment, etc
Lately, they only deserve bottom of the barrel engagement
I truly believe Reddit themselves are using the bots to fake participation.
This was noticeable immediately after the blackout, with all of the “I’m sorry I’m not allowed to generate offensive content” comments .. which I’m sure they only learned to filter away.
https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
Nearly half the active users have disappeared again since the peak.
The official mobile app is also really persistent about pushing content it thinks you might like which has the unintended consequence of generalizing those niche subreddits to the degree that they lose that niche focus. For example, if every /r/movies user gets /r/criterion pushed to them, the content of /r/criterion will slowly transform to match the tastes of the /r/movie users.
Power vacuums filling up always lead to lower quality governance, but it seems that reddit did not have to be governed that well after all.
I entirely quit it myself, and when I do end up driving bythe more niche subreddits from typical search results, I find that it feels way more dead.