Reddit was ruined for me a couple of years ago and AI wasn’t involved. I no longer interact there but I do still read Reddit occasionally. Personally I find it difficult to wade through hundreds of one-liners without forgetting what the post was about.

I find the usefulness of a subreddit is inversely proportional to its size (popularity). There are still some good ones but they are quite small. I had hoped Lemmy would fill this void for me but it’s still too small overall such that the smallest communities are barely active at all. Thus I tend to just scroll the feed of everything and see what catches my eye, admittedly a much less useful way to spend my time since I get sucked into ragebait instead of discussing cool hobbies.

Are you me? Because that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. I set my default browse experience to Top 6 hour and then scroll All. I do miss the community aspect of Reddit. There were other users who I ran into regularly in the comments. And usually not in a hostile way. Hell, there was one sub where I was invited to the mod team because of those interactions. I did that for a couple years and continued to be active in the sub until Reddit start pissing off mods. That and my main “friend” on the mod team had his account nuked by Reddit after he fell for a troll. Reddit removed every comment he had ever made, including wonderful and well cited rebuttals of the right-wing bigotry of the day. So yeah, I logged out of that reddit account and have never logged back in, instead I use a burner account and try not comment on anything.