At that point, they were also open source which was super cool. I always wanted that profile badge you got for submitting a merged PR.

Reddit really went downhill fast after ~2015. I think Lemmy will get there eventually. I remember reddit being a lot smaller back then as well. It took a while to get to the point where niche communities could thrive and I do believe we'll see that happen here as well (even if it takes a decade or so)

I joined maybe 6 years ago, and there was a bit of shit talking and most posts had a troll answer hitting the most votes for some reason, but it was usually pretty good to scroll straight past and find some really insightful comments. There was a lot of good stuff around reddit, but slowly the absurb number of awards, NFT avatars, reposts, and ads every third post started to corrupt it. It was simple enough to switch to a third party app for quite a while, but the garbage slowly took over.

Even if they hadn't pulled 3rd party apps, it was getting pretty close a point where it wasn't worth scrolling past the bullshit.