Reddit’s vote-sorted and nested comments were so goddamn refreshing compared to flat forums. So was the lack of stupid little icons cluttering every post… until emojis fucked that forever by adding color to plain text.

It stayed good (for a certain value of good) for a long time, because it was fairly difficult to exploit and absurdly difficult to monetize. Even the site’s surviving founders just gave up and sold it off. Steve-o stumbled into a decent thing with people paying for little badges on other people’s posts, but apparently that wasn’t good enough, so he tried hocking an entire community.