At first it was all about presenting data in an original looking way. In the end it was about pushing political ideas in your throat using a plain bar graph. It was not about sharing something interesting you found but about taking advantage of a captive audience.
It wasn’t really one sub in particular for me, honestly. The one big thing was the ever-increasing repost comment bots: they started to show up here and there and by now they’re all over comment sections. I don’t get the point of why they were created in the first place, and to me it was very analogous to the overall decline in the site. More bots, less actual discussion.
Agreed on your point about it not just being one particular sub.
It seemed that the comment sections on most subs just devolved to lame jokes that got repeated, or spiraled into into arguments. There were obvious exceptions, but as a whole this was my experience.
The entire reason I started using RES was to filter out any comment that had the words “and my axe”, “this guy’s dead wife”, “fun at parties”, “poop knife”, etc.
This guy filters /s
This too, hugely. I went back to reddit today for a bit and the comments in askreddit were brief, some only one word as an initial reply to the post, or just jokes. I’m all for jokes but it really stood out how reddit has slowly evolved and I really was a boiled frog who didn’t notice til I came to Lemmy and it was actual(!) discussions(!) again.
Most of the time the point is to build up the account’s karma and history. Then it is sold to a company, politician or whatever. In turn they use it to astroturf reddit. Which is much more effective when the account has enough karma and is old enough to post in various subreddits, and stands up to scrutiny thanks to months or years of seemingly normal reddit usage.