The more time that goes on, the more I appreciate how rare and amazing is.

It is an absolute staple of the web and the backbone of most people’s information diet, and for decades it has resisted so many of the dark patterns and negative incentives that the other major players of the internet have fallen prey to.

I feel like Reddit could have been a community pillar like Wikipedia; a central hub for curated discussion fora, but the actual experience of using the site gets worse every day (likely driven by the drive to monetization).

The saddest part is that Reddit is the rule and Wikipedia is the exception. From what I can tell Craigslist is the only comparable story of a high-quality website maintaining its dominance while putting user experience first (and sacrificing revenue in the meantime).

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@pganssle Add YouTube to your list. Originally it was the wild west of videos and film makers of all kinds. Then it started serving adds, and started to dislike that place a bit. Fortunately that thing could be fixed with ublock origin, so I kept watching. Eventually I started hearing stories about video makers being treated unfairly, and nowadays that’s just getting way out of hand. It’s clear that YouTube want’s to be like TV or Netflix. It no longer wants independet video makers of any kind and the only way to get rid of them is to make the environment more and more hostile towards them. Fortunately is there for everyone who want’s to publish videos without the fear of being demonetized, ignored by the algorithm, banned, deleted etc.

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