Am I ugly and rate me are old subs that die off and bounce back once in a while when people realize they exist. That seemed pretty normal to me, trends like that come and go quickly.

That couples meme shit was an odd one. What kind of people are sitting around making loads of memes about boomerhumour couples? Who does that? Memes are almost always niche or inside jokes, not this. This is a marketing company going "we need a subreddit that focuses on happy millennial couples so we can slyly push products there" and coming up with something so....bland.

I definitely saw a lot more of those. RateMe and AmIUgly especially! I thought it was so weird. I also didn’t think anyone else noticed. It seems like very tiktok-y sorts of subs to me.

It felt like there was an overall shift on reddit. I had already seen that the people on it were getting shittier and shittier with their opinions (thank you r/hockey for exposing homophobes and transphobes in bulk), but post blackout it was a completely different site.

Going to have to help get the community's I care about lively over here, but I hope it keeps to a more pleasant and dare I say, less bottled space.

As soon as the protests started and subs went dark or changed formats, the myriad of subs I've never seen on popular ever started hitting the top consistently, and checking individual subs that reopened (forced or otherwise) had even shittier shit than what they would typically have, as well as a massive reduction in the average scores on posts.

The decline in quality could just be exasperated by the exodus, though. I mean, it was already in decline in that department all over the place, but it took a pretty sharp turn once people started leaving.

I didn't notice anything particularly weird about the new subs, though. Just that they were crap.

I don't think it is completely safe to take that tinfoil hat off. Be careful with that.

i don't know if reddit owners have a political agenda with reddit. But clearly Musk has with twitter, and it's an absolutely insane far right agenda. Fitting for a Super rich son of an Emerald mine owner, apartheid white supremacist from South Africa. Completely disconnected from reality.

Yeah it was a weird combination of whatever was leftover from the blackouts. Like yeah maybe 90% of your subs are offline but hey at least you still have /r/rayonsweatpants!

I'll join the silliness. I also noticed a shift in the types of content reaching the front page during the lead-up to the blackout. Posts from subreddits that I haven't seen before. The quality of posts and comments took a severe decline (even worse than usual). I kind of chalked it up to a decrease in active "power users" that post the large majority of highly upvoted content, and the regular users that would upvote said content. I think another possible explanation is that the admins were/are artificially boosting engagement numbers in preparation for their IPO.

Part of me feels like reddit is about to become a propaganda machine.

I'd argue that Reddit has been a propaganda machine long before you joined the site. Reddit has been slowly circling the drain for years now. The post and comment quality used to be so much better when it was still a relatively niche website. Bots, troll farms, and straight up propaganda accounts have been influencing the site more and more. Shit seemed to really start going downhill in 2015 and has only gotten worse. I haven't looked recently, but it used to be easy to find websites that would buy your reddit account, almost certainly to be used for advertising and propaganda purposes.

Reddit used to feel organic and genuine. Real discussions with interesting points of view and information. Scrolling the front page in recent years has been disappointing and frightening. Obvious fake posts from subs like AITA and TIFU. Bots endlessly reposting content. Rage bait that could be a direct copy and paste from yesterday's rage bait. Low quality memes that are transparently pushing an agenda, radicalizing idiots, and re-enforcing the status quo.

I think Cambridge Analytica really opened up Pandora's box. The people that own us figured out how to keep us from ever escaping. They can directly influence what you think by controlling the content you consume. And with advancements in AI language models I only see it getting worse. Automated mind control of the masses brought to us by the fruits of our own labor. Reddit was built by the community, and now it's been turned into one of the greatest propaganda tools you could imagine to control those very people.

I noticed that too. My final hours with Apollo were very confusing if I went anywhere my curated subs.

While I have no intention of going back, it’ll be interesting to see what happens in a few months.

Man, I fucking hate how many rate me or am I ugly or other attention grabing drivel subs are promoted now. Especially the am I asshole posts. I dont care for them

Not necessarily agreeing with you, but I noticed something similar. I can't remember why I was logged out of the official Reddit app honestly, but I was, and all day yesterday I've been getting "suggested posts" and all of these were from r/amiugly, which was weird as hell, especially (again) considering that I was not even logged in, so there was not any sort of algorithm magic going on. I don't know the numbers for that sub so idk if it's just popular, but this is something that I noticed too.