This has been my experience as well. There are countless amazing, small communities on Reddit, and being able to kick the popular subreddits out of my feed makes it feel like one of the last places that embodies the spirit of the early internet. Namely -- small quasi-anonymous communities where people can sincerely discuss niche interests and discover new ones through the serendipity of interaction.

Once old.reddit.com gets turned off, I worry about how long this can persist. The iOS app has tons of clickbait hooks, useless notifications, invitations to join "similar" large, emotional subreddits full of toxicity and extremism.

The non-default niche subreddits are what replaced the BB forums of old.

Interestingly some of the niche subs I'm on also have Discord servers which are lively and interesting, like the days of IRC.

That's really the way to do it. Most of the important info ends up on the sub, while daily shitposts and friendly convos take place on Discord.

There are a couple of open source mobile apps that might save it, assuming API access doesn't eventually get killed too.

I found politics to be too pervasive to escape on Reddit, which is why I eventually deleted my account. I tried to stick to non-political subreddits, but when I found myself reading comments about police brutality in r/dogswithjobs, I knew I no longer wanted to use the site.

What's sad is the political discussions aren't even good. Comments are written to appeal to the lowest common denominator of reader, and a lot of subreddit comment sections move at breakneck speed, so what you end up with is a bunch of politically like-minded people dogpiling on top of each other to write something like "Being a republican at this point is basically saying you agree with killing the planet" (an actual current top comment on r/news right now). A few comments down in the chain will be a Futurama reference.

You need to take responsibility for yourself.

If it bothers you that much, don't let yourself get pulled into political discussions! It's really not that hard. Why do you care if other people waste their time arguing dumb politics? Just ignore it and move on!

Reddit's more popular subs at least used to be usable. But over the last couple of years r/all has turned into reposts, outrage clickbait, misinformation, and propaganda exclusively. I started putting more and more sub on the ignore list, but eventually there was nothing worthwhile left. I've unsubscribed from an increasing number of mid-sized subs as even those have more and more turned into complete circlejerks. At this point, I'm down to a handful of smaller subs that I visit semi regularly.

Maybe it's just me and my tolerance for this kind of BS has declined over the years or maybe the site is steadily getting worse as it gets bigger.

No, on smaller subreddits the downvote button also enforces conformity and a right opinion. You can be as polite as you can, as decent as a scholar, but if your opinion is wrong, you will get downvoted -- and once you get to minus 1, minus 2, chances are other people will downvote you, out of sheer reflex: opinion bad --> already in negative --> here, have another downvote.

It's easier, a thousand times easier, to use the downvote button to express disagreement than to actual type words and construct arguments, and that's how most people will use it.

And I suppose sometimes it can filter the toxic, inflammatory or misleading comment.

On the small subreddits your comment will be seen whether or not it gets downvoted.

I tried that approach and found that even in my niche interest subreddits that I subscribe too that somehow politics always found a way in, and became a top post for some cheeky reason.

Moderators also often selectively enforce the “no politics” rule either by only removing political things that conflict with their personal political views or by defining things that are political as not political so they can continue or vice versa.

I think a big part of the problem of Reddit is that there’s a handful of mods who just moderate everything

I wish there was a Reddit without all that crap, I’d pay money to use it

While I agree with you to some extent, niche subreddits are still subject to Reddit's overall content moderation and policies - which are ultimately based on politics (left-biased). This can range from shadowbans on linking to certain domains to bans on certain viewpoints that apply sitewide to affecting the kind of humor that is allowable to whatever else. Yes those niche communities are less toxic than the giant subreddits, but it still feels like a sort of artificial, inauthentic experience to some extent because you can only be the online person that nearly fits within the overton window of what is deemed acceptable by Reddit's admins and leadership. Others aren't welcome, or if they are there, they can't truly express themselves or be authentic.

This trend of niche forums becoming politically biased isn't limited to Reddit either. For example, much has been written from both the left and the right about how Ravelry, a knitting community, chose a hard-left political bias during the Trump administration (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/style/ravelry-knitting-ba...). When that sort of change happens, a whole lot of people cannot engage in that niche community because it feels like a hostile place to participate, even if the typical piece of content is apolitical.

Even the smaller subreddits now practice 100% more censorship than was required by Reddit admins in the past.

Reddit is a shell of what it once was. Censorship prevails.

Meh. Sometimes if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's not the fault of the downvote button. Reddit had a core culture of openness in the beginning - god knows I had enough debates in the comments. But at some point one side decided that debating isn't enough, and it needs to control the medium.

It might just be an amazing coincidence, but after they succeeded reddit stopped being fun.

And it wasn't even remotely subtle, because it went down kicking, screaming and throwing the wildest tantrums I've ever seen.

Yeah that's what I've experienced too. I usually unsubscribe to all default subs, especially /r/politics and /r/all.

Then the rest of the niche specialized communities are just pure gold. In particular: data_hoarders, anything D&D related, netsec and programming are ok.

The rest however are just obvious old accounts bought by influence campaigns, which now sells for hundreds of dollars. (not to hard to see if you look at their posts history). Reddit made it so that having multiple accounts is much more easy than respecting the rules, especially with their one post by 10 minutes rule for most default subreddits.

Their new site revamp however reeks of a Product Manager (tm) who got too much free time on his hand. If old.reddit.com goes away I don't know if I'll even bother. Thank God for the SingleFile extension for saving my favorite posts.

Reddit subs are still ok but I sensed a slow down, a little decrease in energy even there. Maybe the migration to the new UI bored people too. Strange