I am literally here now because reddit became so unbearably botted that I deleted my account in disgust.

> I go to Reddit for a specific set of sub-reddits

Same here. r/ProgrammingLanguages was great until about four or five years ago. Now the contributions guide is mostly about what you may not post and you almost need a lawyer to find out what is allowed, and the mods again have another opinion about this than what is written and just delete stuff. The result is that I didn't see an interesting post in month.

Could they be maliciously complying with the new (since 2023) Reddit rules for moderators? A lot of subreddits closed, and then Reddit replaced their moderator lists and reopened them (most of those subs are now shit). Maybe the one you mentioned is avoiding running afoul of the don't close your sub rule.

I don't know. But it is apparent that "the" moderator of r/ProgrammingLanguages has an agenda.

Yeah, lemmy is alright but doesn't have a critical mass of users (and may never have that).

I suspect that Reddit is running into similar problems with a slowly dying user base. The reason I suspect this is because Reddit has slowly started to try and hijack the UX to force me into seeing and interacting with subreddits I don't want to see or interact with. The default UX is now "You might be interested in this because you viewed that".

I've noticed a number of formerly pretty active subreddits to be ghosts of their former selves. I've also noticed a ton of new subreddits pop up that appear to be just a mass of bots trying to hook in real users.

A big part of the Reddit problem is that reddit has made it as hard as possible to tell whose a bot. You end up noticing a bunch of 3 month old accounts swarming whenever certain topics come up but you can't dig into their history to see if this is what they always do.

All and all, it feels like the social internet is just dying. I feel like I'm getting more value by revisiting the old forums. (See ya'll at anandtech).

its got around 50k active users retained for 3 years from a 200k peak. Thats pretty good retention and its enough to visit every day for its users.

Unfortunately a lot of old forums are now dominated by a handful of cantankerous or mentally ill people. After all, one had to be a bit weird to hold on to forums as the rest of the world moved away. Other than them and their antics, the place might otherwise be a ghost town. Forums are also greying out, because younger people tend to be less interested in a site accessed from a web browser (which they might never use) instead of a dedicated app.

I tried to recommit myself to forums around 2020, and already then it was too late to find the healthy community I remembered from the early millennium.

The problem with whatsapp is that it's meta, and they have a generally sketchy smell to them.

Banning two thirds of their user base probably has something to do with it becoming a ghost town too.