> I only started browsing reddit after advertisers forced them to purge the most toxic users/content from the site.

Reddit, as a site, is built around you having to subscribe to things to see it on your front page.

Are you saying that opinions you disagree with (toxic) merely existing invisibly prevents you from using a platform? Because if that's not the case you were never forced to interact with those subs unless you explicitly sought them out. The one exception would be /r/all, but again the default is your "home" page so you'd never see that content.

The toxic elements didn't exist invisibly. They bled out regularly into unrelated subreddits. For example, the fat phobia of /r/FatPeopleHate seemed ever present for a time. Popped up in many different places. And then after the sub was banned and many of its users banned, that particular form of insults & speech mostly vanished. It was a huge quality of life improvement for the site overall. There have been similar results from banning some of the more virulent racist and misogynistic subs.

I suppose if you never read the comments, then the subscriptions would keep you away from certain types of content. But if you wanted to participate in the community, only banning and active moderation worked. Subscriptions weren't any barrier at all.

I feel like I’m in between both of you. On the one hand, stuff like fatpeoplehate never had any influence on my usage of reddit, on the other hand I never felt like there was a big difference between before and after the ban (of this or any other subreddit). The big subs are still utter shit, any decently sized sub without strong moderation is utter shit. Small subs are most of the time amazing.

New hate groups and power sub's pop up with the same toxicity but on a different theme. The psycho redpill has been replaced with a version for women.

Reddit doesn't want a 'better' site it just cycles the garbage to fit the trends.

>The psycho redpill has been replaced with a version for women.

Can you elaborate on this?

I forget the name of the subreddit. The old subreddit which captured man's manipulative, controlling & dark side of relationships and general coaching of male sexual behaviour aimed at maximum recreation, has been quarantined a while ago and now the female version with basically the same content about how to deal with the dark side of relationships for women is in vogue. They both overlap with multiple political groups and generally attract the unsavory. They use the same language and have information structured in same format.

Reddit, like HN, was never as good as it used to be, though many like to pretend it was.

The locus has shifted, though. Early Reddit was decidely techy, it's now exceedingly popular/memey. There were and are many cesspits. As well as numerous dead or stagnent fora, several of which I can lay claim to myself.

> Isn't this basically what Disqus was trying to do?

I don't think so. As far as I can tell, Disqus is not decentralized at all. It's basically the same as Facebook comments but from a different company.

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/comments/