Everyone here is completely missing the point. It wasn't the API change, the 'new reddit' UI change, or frankly any other individual change. Those are symptoms of a greater problem - Reddit is social media that succeeded.
This exact same fall happens to any and all social media that succeeds, and is not in any way unique to Reddit.
It grows, and with growth comes complexity and greater expenses to keep it all propped up. In order to pay for those expenses, advertising revenue must increase. To increase advertising revenue, the site must be more 'family friendly' and have stricter moderation. More users means that you can't be as personal and must be more automated. You don't want bad publicity because that can turn advertisers away. If you want more advertising revenue you need more users, which means you need to sand off any rough edges and unique appeal and instead appeal as broadly as possible, regardless of the original intent of the site. To appeal broadly you must add every feature that everyone else has and forget being unique. Broader appeal brings in people who reduce the quality of the content. The larger the site gets, the more appealing it becomes to bots and propoganda. In order to maximize impact for either personal (ego) or professional (money/political) reasons, you need to post content that hits people where they're vulnerable - cute, funny, infuriating, etc.
So, the product experiences enshittification. It's just inevitable. It will always happen to social media if it grows.
You can have a small, niche social media that is good but will never grow - or you can have a large, casually-used social media that is awful. There is no in-between. Anything in-between inevitably slides towards one or the other.
It succeeded for a long time without becoming enshittified. It was the front page of the internet and it was great. Then they took VC funding. That changed everything. That was the driver for all the enshittification that followed. The VCs need to get a 10x return and they only have one playbook — the one you describe. But if they hadn't taken VC funding, maybe they could have found a different path.
If you remember Fark, they did the exact same thing. At some point in these sites' growth/success they always seem to have this irresistible compulsion to do The Grand Redesign which always, always shittifies itself.
I wonder if there were any dissenters inside of Reddit who have actually been on the Internet in 2007, desperately warning the designers that they were "Farking" themselves with that redesign.
What killed Fark was the founder ran for office and we all found out what a terrible person he is. It’s still fun to visit that ghost town and look at the tombstones occasionally.
Eh, I think the reason reddit was resilient against this effect was because of the balkanization resulting from the subreddit model. If you look at an individual subreddit, unless it is incredibly fringe, it will follow the 'social enshittification' model perfectly. Reddit has the advantage that a portion of users can migrate to a newer, still-fringe subreddit as a replacement.
Over time, though, the namespace starts to get cluttered. You have to go to r/realTrueSubreddit2 to find a decent community now. Also, r/realTrueSubreddit1 was taken by nazis/trolls who were mad at getting banned for using slurs.
This exact same fall happens to any and all social media that succeeds, and is not in any way unique to Reddit.
It grows, and with growth comes complexity and greater expenses to keep it all propped up. In order to pay for those expenses, advertising revenue must increase. To increase advertising revenue, the site must be more 'family friendly' and have stricter moderation. More users means that you can't be as personal and must be more automated. You don't want bad publicity because that can turn advertisers away. If you want more advertising revenue you need more users, which means you need to sand off any rough edges and unique appeal and instead appeal as broadly as possible, regardless of the original intent of the site. To appeal broadly you must add every feature that everyone else has and forget being unique. Broader appeal brings in people who reduce the quality of the content. The larger the site gets, the more appealing it becomes to bots and propoganda. In order to maximize impact for either personal (ego) or professional (money/political) reasons, you need to post content that hits people where they're vulnerable - cute, funny, infuriating, etc.
So, the product experiences enshittification. It's just inevitable. It will always happen to social media if it grows.
You can have a small, niche social media that is good but will never grow - or you can have a large, casually-used social media that is awful. There is no in-between. Anything in-between inevitably slides towards one or the other.