The simplest way I've found to describe it is this:

The front page of reddit is now nothing but images and videos, or self posts.

I clearly remember when reddit was mostly aggregated long form text content. I won't state that that's always better, but you can't find it hardly ANYWHERE on reddit today without logging in and selecting subreddits.

I think a fundamental problem with user ranked sites is that as the population grows, the very nature of the most popular posts is that they appeal to all of that broad population. I find this often means the content is... drivel. It's that 3 second feel good item, or that 5 minute rant. It's never content that requires time to digest and might challenge your assumptions or world views.

Recently I opened the /hot feed on r/all and began blocking the subreddit of posts that were non-text.

...I think I blocked 200+ blocked subreddits my feed is still all pictures and videos. Even checking now, there are only two text posts on my r/all: r/AskReddit and r/NoStupidQuestions.

Really frustrating. Also, searching self:yes doesn't seem to work for me, I think it was deprecated?