I don’t think the “troublemakers” are likely to be the people who make Reddit interesting. The troublemakers are the people who are complaining the loudest about Reddit, and the people who make the site interesting are the people who spend most of their time caring about other things besides Reddit.

In the PC world, the power users could graduate into developers and make apps to share with everyone. In the Reddit world, the power users are people who are interested in farming for karma, the people who stake out claims as moderators, the people who respond to tons of AITA / legaladvice / relationships posts.

When I hear someone ranting, pissed off, about the latest Windows or macOS update, or systemd, it’s often because they use computers to get work done, and having the tech stack change under your feet makes it hard to get work done. Broad sense of the word “work” here, when I say “get work done”.

Nobody’s getting work done on Reddit, it’s a time drain from other stuff we could be doing. (Like, not nobody nobody, just nobody.)

This is very short-sighted.

The best places on reddit are good dude to stringent moderation.

They are all going dark in response. This will remove all quality from Reddit and finally turn it fully into a meme and porn dump.

In recent years I have seen more and more people comment here that they search reddit rather than the web when they want to get decent results. I can absolutely imagine that this could end relatively soon, and whether a "meme and porn" version of reddit is really worth more than a "central platform of all niche forums for all topics" reddit remains to be seen.... The fact that there have been many "meme and porn" platforms that came and went in the past makes me question that...

The good places on Reddit, with tight moderation, are few and far between. I can think of r/AskHistorians, but there are not many like it (I can’t think of another, off the top of my head). Maybe you know of other examples?

askhistorians is an extreme example. They basically change the entire nature of the site through very visible moderation. But my understanding is that places like r/physics would be drowning in lazy memes as well. Take any subreddit you like and look at the posting guidelines. Chances are they are there in reaction to significant amounts of people acting contrary to them.

I see what you are talking about, but I don’t think it makes Reddit interesting. It’s kind of like having a bunch of different HOA boards, all fighting over how to mow the lawns or what colors to paint the houses in their respective communities.

The people who make Reddit interesting are, IMO, the content creators and the people who answer questions. The content creators are spending most of their time off-Reddit, working on projects. The people answering questions are browsing /new on a few subreddits, killing time, and watching a mostly unmoderated stream of posts.

The moderation rules for individual subreddits are usually annoying—things like karma minimums, minimum ages, and sometimes a bunch of weird rules about what you can post and how you can post it. Rules against self-promotion.

Additionally I'll point out that people who search reddit like that are some of the most valuable visitors on ads-based platform, as many of them are looking for shopping advice.

Reddit used to be interesting but ever since it became a TikTok / Instagram meme clone with r/all, there really is no need for these sorts of power users. Sure, some subs like r/AskHistorians will suffer but I doubt they'll entirely leave the site, there is no alternative.

Having less stringent and totalitarian moderation might bring different sort of userbase to more active. And not even affect the number of passive one. It's not like in general people care about quality on Internet...