As a mod of a small(-ish) gaming sub, I noticed.:-)

One example is how on r/Android, people would ignore the daily posted and pinned (or perhaps it was weekly?) mega thread, and constantly ask questions like "what phone should I buy?", "which Android device should I purchase?", "should I get an Android and if so, which one?" Setting aside how these are impossible without sufficient details e.g. what price range, what country is the OP from, are there relevant sales they are eyeing that would make the calculations different than from simply reading the existing posts that all ask precisely the same question ⁉️... anyway in addition to all that, it made it extremely difficult to have discussions of any real substance.

Combine this with the engagement algorithms and Reddit pushes all that crap (bc it's "new") above even extremely highly rated content, even if it was merely a few days old.

Post flairs helped, except that submitters entirely ignore those rules just like they do everything else. User flairs as well, except... same.

About the only thing that really worked was writing your own moderation bot. Ofc the disruption of the 3rd-party tools by making the API cost irl money 🤑💰💵💸 stopped that from working as well.

In short, you must have been in some very well-moderated spaces, possibly also niche, and if you did not browse r/all (or rather r/pop) then yeah, you could miss that trend. But it was definitely happening, and people talked about it in the subs dedicated to moderation.

It did not help that Reddit continually made changes that made it worse over time - practically hiding the rules from new posters to a community, seemingly in an effort to switch the focus away from the roots (before I joined Reddit) of having multiple forums on one combined platform - e.g. each having their own design, like CSS elements (I even made some of these!:-), to having all forums be part of one giant interconnected space, with efforts to erase divisions when moving from one community to another.

i.e. the endless streaming of "content", but ENCOURAGING interaction via commenting or at least voting, despite whether the audience has any business doing so, e.g. whether their interactions add, do nothing to, or even detract from the conversation.

^THIS

I also choose this guy's wife

And my bow

etc. To be fair, a little of that is just plain funny, and I hope we can allow for such here on Lemmy (it seems we do actually, when offered with respect?), but when the comments are just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of such in a row, such that it becomes impossible to find anything ELSE besides that... that is when a line has been crossed, and the platform becomes more difficult to read than it is worth. Imagine walking past a preschool on your way to work, and no matter how old you get (30, 40, 50, 60), they always remain the same - babbling as they play. Which they NEED, and hopefully you can enjoy engaging with it yourself. But at some point... don't you need to get on over to work? When the noise crowds out the signal entirely, making more adult conversations next to impossible, then the only solution is to leave.

Or kick the kids out, i.e. moderation, but that requires enormous efforts. Some subs still do it, but the more Reddit enshittifies the harder it becomes.

And it's not merely Reddit, it's simply the nature of the game: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb.