I've been on Reddit for over 10 years. It's a search engine for me now, I've simply aged out of most of the discussions on there. I'm fine with that, because it's still useful for search queries like "Things to do in [city_name]".
I first started using Reddit around 2009 when I was in college and use it more today.
I browse old.reddit.com because I think that text feel is better.
I think it probably depends on your subreddit or area of interest? For my making hobbies I find it to be the best forum out there. Extremely good for my sports and television discussion as well.
It does sort of make me wonder what community need Reddit fulfills - discoverability/searchability? Single login? - because it's sort of a weird halfway house between forums (differing in that not searching, and duplicating an old thread is somewhat necessarily okay) and chat.
Yep. It's just a shame reddit is such a mess now in terms of their devolution of UI (for example their "old" UI now shows random links in the middle, their mobile experience is trash, etc), which is a pain as there is so much useful information there for very niche searches.
Reddit & Stackoverflow are great for niche searches, and I'm glad we have them. Also comes up with HN and now and then that someone chimes in with a great tidbit.
I want reddit, but on given topics, but without newbies. Age might be a nice filter, but being able to chat about {fitness, running,travel,entrepreuneurialism} away from the crowds that barrel in with "Does anyone else ever..." or "Where/how do I..." 1st year stuff.
Old timers (‘scuse me while I slam a geritol and bourbon) will remember that when reddit first launched, there was a recommendation engine that purportedly took your votes and turned them into a personal page of stories you would enjoy.
It was scrapped and eventually subreddits were introduced. I think people like the idea of communities.
Reddit has been doing a great job for my use case. Since I decided to quit it a few years ago they've made so many absurd changes that every time I land on it by chance I can't make head or tails of it, can't find the post, the comments, nothing.
old.Reddit.com along with RES and only having handpicked subreddits on your front page (ie none of the default dumpster fire ones) makes Reddit halfway decent.
I've found using old.reddit.com, unsubscribing from the default subs, and adblock still leave Reddit as one of the few enjoyable places on the internet for me. There is still legitimate, organic discovery and discourse that I find there.
The times I occasionally get pulled into the void are when following a user's content/comment that I found interesting, then finding all kinds of bile that they push to the main forums.
Reddit also has an underappreciated feature of being able to sort posts database style (e.g. Top Posts > All Time) to get a sense of what a particular community found transcendent or controversial. If the top posts are any kind of angry response to a current event that's one you can typically ignore.
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