Social media dies when it’s ubiquitous. People shouldn’t all be in the same place and there were days when not everyone had even heard of reddit let alone were using it.

I think maybe 2011-2014. Around the Stop SopaPipa days. Reddit was a lot more organic. AMAs were basically revolutionary and always interesting. There was no corporate engagement and super users were rare. And the super users that did exist were like shittymorph, the sketch dude, poem for your sprog, Ramsesthepidgeon, gallowboob (before they sold out), pepsi_next. And they were normal people making no money, moderating subreddits reasonably. There actually was sort of an expectation that you read the article before commenting. When you clicked the thumbnail it actually opened the link whereas now Reddit opens you directly to the comments. This was before new Reddit. Old Reddit forever.

There was very little extreme polarization and the gross subreddits were tiny. This was before red pill and incels. There were obviously the furry subreddits and porn and whatnot but not widespread revengeporn and CP. Reddit meetups were common and the people who actually met up were normal. There was the Reddit holiday gift exchange and for a few years Bill Gates participated discretely and some lucky person would get something thoughtfully picked out by Bill Gates. The Reddit April fools joke was cheeky and not some big thing. I think r/place might be where they jumped the shark a bit. It was cool until people started making bots for it. but then I think orangered vs periwinkle were sort of the peak because it didn’t take over the internet.

The conservative subreddit wasn’t actual conservatives having reasonable conversations and not just shouting at liberals about conspiracies and the politics subreddit wasn’t just liberals, it was a mix.

Reddit was where memes originated. They were here first.

The news subreddit wasn’t just the same article headlines posted by interns and bots at those news agencies by the same 6 news agencies.