Redditors make Reddit
The company is sadly dead weight we are dragging behind us.
Reading your post initially I was wondering if another Mod might have posted it, but by the end it sounds like you got to the bottom of the issue.
Sad, but not really a surprise from the current brain trust. These are the same jerks that messed up old. made the new web interface a hellscape, and dick with third party clients.
It's one of the few sites I access on mobile and don't ruthlessly adblock(like this one), but I'm fed up with Reddits B.S. with the constant nagging to install their crappy app, blocking people from viewing non adult/extreme/controversial posts unless logged in, etc.
One of the main reasons that I WASN'T freaking out about the news they got hacked is that Reddit has very little information on me. I never sign in unless I am posting, I provided no information that was closely associated to me in that account, and I don't spend a ton of time talking about myself. I also don't care about the karma game much, so I roll into a new account every few years. Not that IDing an old IP couldn't expose me to harassment, but I'd be more concerned if the user info for this forum got cracked that my Reddit history.
That is one of the things I liked about Reddit, but it also has rolled the welcome mat out to a lot of the toxic fringe. r/thedonald got all the press, but r/fuckcars, PCM, and sadly, even r/science have been taken over by a single viewpoint and set to full broadcast mode. 4chan and 8 have made playing with Reddit one of their favorite pastimes, shitposting, trolling, and raiding away. White nationalists constantly try to upvote racist dogwhistles and nazi pictures to the front page(Yeah, it just historical enthusiasm for military equipment from a very specific nation and time, sure buddy). "Wellness" influencers spread organic free range brain rot. And every sub has an stream of attractive girls cross posting that also casually drop that they have an OnlyFans page as often as they "forget" to pull up their top in the selfies they post. As the other social media sites bleed users, Reddit succumbed to the rot brought in with a tide of new users that were never part of the Reddit community before and tried unconsciously to make reddit like Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, or whatever other place they came from.
Reddit the company need to tackle some of these problems instead of thinking they can keep boiling the frog. Twitter and Facebook have both crashed, snap is yesterdays news, and all the good TikTok content ends up on Reddit anyway. But the platform they provide isn't precious or special. And the constant harassment and nagging as the community becomes more polarized and toxic is how they will go over their own version of the same cliff. Most of the community than made the old Reddit take off were refugees from the beached wrecks of the last 5 "cool kid" forum sites.
slashdot and myspace and tribe and a dozen mostly forgotten names that dropped the ball and never really recovered.
Reddit needs to right the ship before it capsizes. Right now it's flailing around trying to monetize the site in ways that everyone hates, censoring speech while adding fake posts and sponsored content, while turning a blind eye to mod teams that have gone of the rails and hijacked high traffic subs to spread scams, propaganda, hate, and madness. Instead of banning whole subs or hiding them, they should be installing an editorial board to keep the mods from deleting posts that don't break guidelines but DO fact check the sub, or make a well argued case against the postion of the mods. That would help regardless of the specific "echo chamber" sub or it's political view.
Another issue us the way some mods act like a sub like r/news or r/science should be their personal fiefdom, with no checks on their authority and no accountability. I'd be fine if /u/smokemylog runs /r/trucknutsnewsdaily however they like. But with as much impact and traffic as the big subs like r/news and r/science get, it damages the credibly of Reddit as a whole and harms the community if those subs are solely policed with mods that refuse to do basic fact checking on the posts there. And no other sub that DID could get traction because the site framework of Reddit itself is sending all the traffic to the subs they know are broken. (cynically, I expect they KNOW this, but are making money off pushing crap articles to viewers and that some of those sites are also buying ads. The high profile campaign by the Hobby Lobby set being a fine example. They are buying ads as well as running subs to try and own the front page.)