Redditors who have been here since the start, how has Reddit changed for the better/worse?

Reddit was funded by a venture capitalist named Paul Graham. Graham was famous in tech circles for writing some nice essays and popularizing Bayesian spam filtering, which was a huge improvement over previous strategies.

Early Reddit (Aug 2005) was mostly tech/science news, programming essays, and thoughtful history/politics. It expanded rapidly through the programming world beacuse it's a fairly homogenous place. Adding comments (Dec 2005) was surprising and people were on the fence about it for a while. It was seen as taking away from the comments on the blogs it was lining to. Turned out to be really good for Reddit, of course. It grew and grew - mostly through word of mouth. There's an interview in the extras with Ohanion for Gabriel Weinberg's book Traction, if you're curious.

Reddit used to be a monoculture, still heavily influenced by the early tech days. Then subreddits showed up in Jan 2008 and things changed really fast. There was a lot of confusion around crossposting and little visibility into finding subreddits, so it broke down into subcommunities that didn't talk to each other pretty fast.

Speaking as a nerd, 2008 was a really nice year for Reddit. /r/programming had a ton of content for web developers and people would read, comment, and write new blog posts responding to things they'd read. It felt like a community-wide exercise in figuring things out, whether that was closures, CSS2, or the latest piece from Steve Yegge, Paul Graham, or Reginald Braithwaite.

I haven't had that feeling in a long time. Now it's less like a backyard barbeque and more like a dysfunctional HOA. The front page is lowest-common-denominator stuff... pop culture, kittens, videos that you can feel smug laughing at, etc. It's really nice to see posts like "I built this table", the posts where people are producing things instead of just consuming content.

source: wasting time here since fall '05

/r/AskReddit Thread