I admit to spending too much time on Reddit during my work day as a distraction. It's a problem. What's worse is that Reddit has become so full of uninteresting content that I spend most of my time downvoting things that aren't at all relevant to the sub they're posted in. And with a lot of the front page subs being offline, the experience is dreadfully worse.
Reddit is barely any different from any other social media platform now. People just want to argue for the sake of arguing and getting hive mind support without any interest in the relevance or context of the original post (ie., no one reads the articles). Reddit has an algorithm just like any other social media platform to push engaging content to the top so they can get more ad revenue. I've been saying it for years now, Reddit is trash. But damn is it addictive.
I'm thankful for Lemmy and KBin and Mastodon (and my RSS reader) for providing interesting, relevant, chronologically posted content with a minimal amount of dilution. I don't spend as much time here but it serves the purpose of informing and entertaining me for a five minute work break without the frustration of "being social media".
It was an ongoing meme that "reddit was better a few years ago and kinda sucks now" but I really think it was accurately the case. Everyone remembers it being at its best when they first signed up because it had been on a slow, consistent downward slide from around 2010 on.
The last couple of years were so bad that I was already going to other sites for actual news and whatnot because anything outside of small, niche subs were overrun with bots (or trolls, since they were functionally the same).