>We spent too much time firefighting and not enough time innovating
I honestly don't mean this in a back-handed manner, but what innovations have come about since that time? Reddit is great because of its momentum and user generated content. That model does best when the admins stay out of the way for the most part. Many (including myself) are not at all a fan of the more recently emerging dark patterns or the site redesign. I don't see those as innovations.
I stopped working there right as it exploded, so I can't list them all, but I know a ton of backend work was done after I left to make site more stable and faster.
And externally the biggest one was mobile support, which is light years ahead of what it was back then.
Light years ahead with a subset of the features. Reddit has been down for me a lot lately too. I'm not sure Reddit has been getting better tbh. As long as the communities stick around I'll keep using it though. I like reddit a lot.
I wish there was more firefighting now - the state of being logged in is broken way to often, and lets not talk about constantly getting a broken auto-scroll that gets the first content but not enough to fill the page, and then don't ever fetch any more.
