Was a daily user of reddit for four years. I saw a marked decline in quality and what was actually posted. Back in heydays, lot of talk on Occupy Movement, 99%, Snowden, Assange, privacy movements, heavy tech focus, gaming. Left of center. The last two years, last year especially, I've noticed a radical shift. All the political stuff, anything that questioned corporate interests, has been dissapearing. Reddit has been actively policing the site and removing posts not because they're obscene, but because they believe in different theories of politics, economics. Been a lot more blatant advertisers, shills pretending to be users, trying to sneak in references to popular name brands. And with Ellen Pao, at the same time it became quite clear that the executive people who bought Reddit were wanting to monetize it, bring in advertisers, turn it into a money making machine. Which means dumbing down, taking away the politics, take away the dissenters, censor what's allowed to be discussed, flood the site with advertisement. More managing speak. More jargon from the admins. Increasingly out of touch. There's been shown a real clear push to stop focusing on the community, and focusing instead in monetizing and making a quick buck, no matter if it drags the site down, no matter if it kills it. And given we're living in a time when a lot of people are getting angry about how politics and laws are manipulated by people in power, people with money, widening economic divide between upper class and all the lower class, it's understandable why the Reddit issue became as inflamed as it did. Important to keep in mind: a lot of the drastic changes, shifts in content... Imagine you live in North Korea. All information gets filtered, North Korea decides what info you hear. Unless you educate yourself, you accept this, and it doesn't occur to you what's happening. North Korea doctrine is all. When you're INSIDE it, it's hard to tell. You can only tell via statistics, causal analysis, research, long term analysis, data comparisons from year to year, etc. it's about the absence of once was. And many people are so easily distracted, they don't notice. And the people who DO notice are told they're imagining things, what's the hubbub about?
It's not the admins (read: reddit employees) making those changes, tho. The mods are the ones who're making those changes and decisions, and they are doing that in large part as a response to a shift in the userbase that has lead to a lot more bitter fights over anything related to social justice issues. The actual changes coming from the admin team have been almost unnoticeable, and even the banning of FPH was reasonably in line with their banning of other subs like /gameoftrolls and /niggers.
Which highlights the whole problem of the land grab that subreddits are, and why hubski is just fundamentally a better way for a community. Monetizing it is going to be much harder but honestly, there are ways that don't involve turning the community into a product.
It's a different way, and better isn't a useful term unless you define your metrics for what constitutes better/worse. Users here are far more responsible for managing their own curation, and topic-specific communities will be much more weakly defined and amorphous. Significant growth of this site will be a real stress test for how this style of social media will work at scale. One of the great features of reddit is the ability to create small, closeknit, well-defined, single topic communities that can be joined with little hassle by new members.