reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).
the reason why this happened is because reddit is a for-profit company and tries to extract money out of the userbase, at the expense of the users.
another example of a bad decision that reddit made was to push a lot of ragebait (“Am I The Asshole?”) because company shareholders want to see “engagement numbers” go up, and if somebody writes an angry reply to a post, that’s “engagement”. but it makes you angry at the stupidity of the “Asshole”, so it makes your day worse. that is another example how reddit makes money at the expense of the users.
size (number of monthly active users) is not what made reddit bad. commercialization is.
we should probably get rid of the “don’t make lemmy grow, it will ruin the platform if we grow” idea.
Bad is such an imprecise term it’s kind of meaningless. Reddit has a radioactive community, an enshitified user experience, and employs many hostile anti-user policies that make engaging and using the product difficult and unpleasant. There is no one cause for any of that.
The toxicity of the community is due to the free speech absolutist nonsense that spez preached in the 2010’s that allowed /r/redpill and /thedonald to fester and spread across the platform stoking hostilities and prejudices. The “hivemind” is a direct result of the karma system and making the number go up that lead to precanned tropes, memes, and opinions that act as nostalgia inducer and thought terminating cliche.
The ux/ui has remained largely stagnant in terms of improvements from the “new” reddit facelift while pressure from VC’s to monetize the platform have resulted in a series of business decisions that spurred on rapid enshitificaiton in the hopes of turning the company profitable to pay back investors.
Reddit HQ does little to vet mods, even on major subreddits, which leads not only to some very questionable moderation decisions but also the manipulation of content with an agenda. Unpaid mods are over-relied on for content moderation on a commercial platform and are not given sufficient resources to control spam, trolls, and bots. These problems have lead to extremely hostile community rules for the majority of subreddits that require users to have generated a sufficient amount of karma to even leave comments, making the new user experience abysmal.
There are so many more things that factor into why reddit is an unpleasant platform to use, but monetization isn’t even in the top 3. Look at how well facebook, insta, X, threads and even reddit are doing. No one likes ads and user tracking, but it doesn’t bother most people enough to abandon a platform that still has a strong network effect in play.
I’ve been a relatively active Lemmy user for two and a half years and I can’t give you specific numbers on how much it’s grown in that time, but anecdotally Lemmy’s community is not as friendly, nuanced, or intelligent as it used to be. In fact it’s taken on a lot of traits reddit’s community has that make it unpleasant, such as black and white thinking, grievance-based worldviews, and unflinching ideological zealots.
It’s the lifecycle of social media, Lemmy is out of it’s early adopter driven infancy and has now moved into it’s chronically online driven adolescence. How Lemmy will change as time goes on will in large part be driven by the demographics of the users.