I agree - the Mastodon platform, while much better than Twitter, still makes it difficult to find good communities, and a lot of the ragebait gets pushed to the top due to engagement. It takes some active curation of your feed to make it worthwhile.

I recommend using Kbin. It reads both Lemmy and Mastodon, and can classify Mastodon toots based on tagged topic. Additionally, if you’re in a community / magazine, Kbin also looks for Mastodon Toots based on moderator assigned tags to that community, and posts it in their Microblog section.

Lol - shows you how old I am. There was a point, pre-Digg and pre-Reddit, where Slashdot was the premiere news aggregation site (circa 2000 - 2004) followed closely by Fark.com as the premiere shitposting site… mainly because they were the first to use the post/commentary style that made Reddit and Digg so popular. Slashdot didn’t aspire to this point of prominence - they simply assumed it because there was nothing else out there at the time that was as good.

You’re correct that when Reddit and Digg came on the scene, they pretty much erased the concept of Slashdot or Fark being the “frontpage of the internet”. Neither site died, as you note, and Slashdot in particular continued to maintain an active community that persists to this day by keeping their content tech-focused and not fucking with the user experience that made them popular in the first place.

I chose Fark and Slashdot as examples because I think unlike Digg (which just completely collapsed), I do see Reddit communities persisting in a similar reduced form.

Agreed - I think that the trend was in play already. The protests tapped into it and definitely accelerated it, but the decline in the quality of posting and commentary has been steadily increasing since 2015. I personally mark the sudden popularity of The_Donald as the point at which the community started to die - the influx of Russian trolls, bots, and their 4chan goon squads was the beginning of the end for intelligent discussion on the site in my opinion.

I’d like to introduce the gizmodo.com writers to the term Pyrrhic victory. One look at /r/all and it’s become nothing but reposts and memes that are hours, if not days old.

Reddit drove out its most important users - the moderators and content creators. They have enough old content to keep their viewership for awhile, but they’ll never regain the community trust they’ve lost. And this will continue to kill their influx of new material, which will inevitably erode the viewer base.

Do I think reddit will die? No, it will continue on, just as have slashdot and fark and other staple communities from the same era, but the highwater mark of the community as the “front page of the internet” is long past.

Holy wall of text, batman!

Line breaks, my man - readability is key to getting your message across. This is an interesting topic, but it’s lost due to the formatting.

Ok, but if you don’t return them this time I’m sending your ass to collections.

For all the Redditors now breathing a sigh of relief, grab a beer, take a load off, and remember, remember, the 5th of November.