I admit to spending too much time on Reddit during my work day as a distraction. It's a problem. What's worse is that Reddit has become so full of uninteresting content that I spend most of my time downvoting things that aren't at all relevant to the sub they're posted in. And with a lot of the front page subs being offline, the experience is dreadfully worse.
Reddit is barely any different from any other social media platform now. People just want to argue for the sake of arguing and getting hive mind support without any interest in the relevance or context of the original post (ie., no one reads the articles). Reddit has an algorithm just like any other social media platform to push engaging content to the top so they can get more ad revenue. I've been saying it for years now, Reddit is trash. But damn is it addictive.
I'm thankful for Lemmy and KBin and Mastodon (and my RSS reader) for providing interesting, relevant, chronologically posted content with a minimal amount of dilution. I don't spend as much time here but it serves the purpose of informing and entertaining me for a five minute work break without the frustration of "being social media".
They're bots. And people simple enough to basically be bots. All the people worth a damn left already, or are perhaps sticking around out of some combination of masochism, morbid curiosity and dogged stubbornness. This latter group would admittedly be a pretty huge segment, probably.
But yea, I still check in sometimes too. The specific video game subs are mostly unchanged in my experience, and reddit still has us soundly beat in that arena. It's a major source of their remaining strength.
I would say any niche sub remains pretty good. I look at a lot of camping and outdoors stuff, and I don’t notice a change there, either. But yeah, the “popular” subs are not nearly as “good” as they were (whatever that means…).