This article explains some of the story of how Google came to its current state of prioritizing Reddit results (and also a good bit about how Reddit the company is faring these days -- less about how Reddit the community is doing).
The World Wide Web from which Reddit grew, and for which Huffman [co-founder and now-CEO of Reddit] expresses so much reverence, has been going through something akin to ecological collapse after being poisoned, then abandoned, by advertisers that have little use for independent websites anymore.
I'm not sure I buy the "advertisers destroyed the internet" story. At least, there are a number of ways of telling it. This article sticks with the traditional line:
Google’s response to the gradual breakdown of the digital commons has been to send more and more people to Reddit, where relevant results are at least probably written by human beings, lavishing the site with traffic but binding the companies’ fates together.
Supposedly, this was in response to users of Search appending "reddit" to many of their searches because otherwise because SEO had gotten so gamed. However, there was also a deal: in Feb 2024, Google got access to Reddit's data API for AI training purposes and Reddit got boosted in Google's results.
Being one of the last islands of humanity on a dying web may make you more appealing to, well, humans. But it also makes you even more valuable to the companies doing the killing.
The authors seem to have had a much better experience on Reddit than I ever had. I wonder at times if the problem we are talking about here is not what people are posting on the internet and how, but what people use to discover things on the internet and how those discovery tools work.
Like Wikipedia, Reddit works only if people feel like posting there and if moderators feel like volunteering hours a week — or a day — to keep things clean, civil, or at least functional.
It's a package deal, though, and part of the problem with Reddit is that volunteer mods are not as accountable as employees. Whatever the case, Reddit certainly has been posting some impressive numbers.
r/bitcoinwas okay until the whole Bitcoin Unlimited drama; I unsubscribed at some point after that because the toxicity was becoming annoying. It was cool that you could just ask nullc or jgarzik something though, and it looks like you can still do that there today. I've left Reddit fully right before the WSB hype though, it didn't feel like "home" anymore. Whenever I take the trouble of opening tor browser to read reddit, I still feel it's no longer the cool place it used to be; more degenerate, less intelligent, though sometimes funny.