Reddit has been a cesspit for years at this point. My account dates to 2006 (I think this is well before most of the commenters there were born). Sometime after about 2014, they switched from a very readable front page format to some Facebook/Tiktok-like abomination, and geared the site towards “mobile users”. That redesign gamed the whole site, now there are hundreds of little trophy things that you can “award” to other users (I think you’re supposed to pay cash to do that?). There are “metric converter bot”-style bots running around, spamming things up with garbage. No one finds those funny, and it’s difficult to understand why they’re allowed to exist at first if everyone either hates them or should hate them… they fill the site with more “traffic” which is used to sell advertising.

On reddit, you’re not the user. You are the product that they sell to someone else (just like everywhere else). It would be counter-productive to have you reading and thinking and speaking there, because that sort of person might become intelligent enough to be annoyed with their attempts to make money.