Every time someone mentions reddit 14 years ago all I can think about are all the admins that allowed r/jailbait on the front page. I honestly wouldn't tell people you used it then
It was a significant shift in social media and internet history, regardless of what some fringe subreddits had.
There weren't any NSFW ones on that list, and it sure didn't include the controversial ones you guys are pointing to. Maybe if you went to /all; but that's definitely not the frontpage/homepage, and even then you'd have to specifically enable NSFW for those to show up.
By the time the frontpage started including popular subs, those subs had long since been expunged from the website.
Nobody here is defending Reddit’s choice to use a poor front page algorithm that allowed for surfacing obscene, fringe or even illegal content over a decade ago.
Have you ever been to such websites as Instagram or TikTok?