I am also a long time reddit user, 10 or so years at this point. It's not obvious to me that reddit is particularly different than it was in the past. There's just more of it now.

It depends: each subreddit is its own little world

Personally, I think the last few years have seen more issues with brigading and bad / unethical subreddit moderators. But other than that, I agree completely.

As another long time (10 year) reddit user: agreed.

Yes, that's my feeling as well.

If you browse /r/all/top?t=day it is VERY different from a few years ago

I remember the first slide to anarchy was vague titles. "This." or "Good boy" etc would never be upvoted. Instead you would have long descriptive titles that summarized the link.

Images became far more common to share, with imgur and then reddit providing hosting.

Subreddit politics got crazy between moderators of large subreddits and between admins and users when very questionable subreddits started popularizing.

US politics happened. Conspiracies and fake news and then The_Donald somehow taking over half of the entire front page.

I still love using reddit for the smaller communities, but to say it hasn't changed is so false. You can rewind and check out archives of the site from 10 years ago and you'll see.

Really? f7u12 was really big early on, as was wtf, politics, atheism (back when the sub was way more crapping on religion) and videos:

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fimg.gawkera...

also 10 year club, defaults are full of stupid memes and what is popular right now but there are tons of great smaller subreddits that i read daily.

I'd like a reddit-like site that is more exclusive, it filters out the non-serious users with a yearly subscription fee of say $100.

"I'd like a reddit-like site that is more exclusive, it filters out the non-serious users with a yearly subscription fee of say $100."

This exists: https://www.metafilter.com/

The fee is $5 which turns out to be an insurmountable barrier for just about everyone. I personally like the site very much.

Metafilter has just about the highest groupthink quotient of any site I know of. Every single post ends up being about social justice, even when it isn't.

Agreed. I know that going in, though, and I still enjoy a lot of it.

About two years ago I tried membership in The WELL, the semi-mythical web community that used to be featured in the printed booklets that came with 28.8kbps dial-up modems.

The retro interface was nice but the populace was incredibly homogeneous and everything was saturated with San Francisco liberal politics. I concluded that the insurmountable joining fees led the website to be frozen with a small self-referential community.

This is cool, I may join! Thanks

I've made reddit more enjoyable in the past by using plugins that auto collapse comments past depth 1 or 2. On avg, conversation devolves past that point.

I've since quit Reddit but comments here have convinced me to take a second look. I think this time around I will put even more filters in place, like no subreddits with over 10k subs, and some way to hide everyone's karma count including my own.

I guess what I'm trying to say is maybe you and I don't need a pay wall to filter, we just need an opinionated browser plugin (or easy way to share settings in RES)

Subscription filters might also filter out un-employed content producers who have free time to produce the quality content in the first place.

That's invite-only. Got any?

Metafilter started with premise but it grew into something so obnoxious imo.

I made an ad-free reddit alternative that has the option of super-liking a post to send $5 (minus paypal fees) to the author: https://www.vlnc.co/

I used Reddit for a long time and stayed in niche interest subreddits[1], far away from the defaults featured on the front page. While there was certainly some interesting discussions happening, anything even slightly controversial or contrary to the groupthink got downvoted quickly, or even deleted by mods in some cases. In some cases, even the mods got into flamewars and harassment.

Add to this the absolutely horrible user interface that makes navigating long comment threads borderline impossible, it's just a damn mess. The whole setup and layout encourages pithy one-liners instead of longer more thoughtful posts. Not that those don't exist, but they're exceedingly rare.

I deleted my account and I haven't looked back. I'll still look through a Reddit thread if it comes up as a search result, but I don't go there deliberately, and I refuse to create a new user.

[1] Mostly related to my hobbies, such as vintage audio gear, pro audio, cars/motorcycles, metal music, booze and cooking.