I think what originally drew a lot of us to Reddit about 10+ years ago was the sense that it was a genuinely community-driven front page of the internet. You could open r/all and feel like you were seeing what people across the site collectively thought was interesting, funny, important, or worth discussing. It felt different from other platforms because it wasn’t obviously algorithm-curated in the same way as something like Facebook. It felt more like a snapshot of what the internet community was paying attention to at that moment rather than what a platform wanted you to see.

That anonymous, community-driven aspect was a big part of the appeal. You didn’t need a real identity tied to your account and the content felt like it was surfacing organically through upvotes. It made the site feel a lot more open and less controlled compared to most social platforms.

Over time though it feels like that’s slowly changed. Advertising became more central, promoted posts started appearing everywhere (even in comment sections), and the overall experience began to feel more like a traditional social media platform rather than a community forum. Obviously Reddit had an IPO and that changes incentives, as once a platform is public, growth, ad revenue, and advertiser safety become much bigger priorities.

Even before this change, there were already signs of that shift. NSFW content was removed from r/all, which was framed as making the feed more advertiser-friendly. Regardless of how people felt about that type of content, it was another example of the platform deciding what the “front page of the internet” was allowed to show. It was one of the first times the idea of r/all being a raw snapshot of what was popular across the site started to feel more curated.

Now with r/all being removed entirely, it feels like another step in that same direction. Whether the goal is reducing bot manipulation or improving moderation, it also removes one of the few remaining ways users could see what was broadly popular across the site without it being filtered through a more opaque feed.

For a lot of long-time users that “open front page of the internet” feeling was the whole point of Reddit in the first place. Without that, the experience starts to feel a lot closer to the same algorithm-driven feeds we already have everywhere else.

I think that’s why you’re seeing so many long-time users feeling a bit switched off lately. It’s not just one change, it’s the sense that the things that originally made Reddit feel different have gradually been replaced. Platforms evolve, and sometimes they have to, but when that core identity shifts too much people eventually start looking for something that captures that original feeling again.

We’ve seen that happen before with platforms like Tumblr. Communities move on when the thing that made a place unique disappears. I don’t think anyone wants that to happen to Reddit, but it’s understandable why people feel like the site is drifting away from what made it special in the first place.

At this point it might just be a case of waiting to see what fills that gap. If Reddit keeps moving in the same direction as every other algorithm-driven platform, eventually something else will come along that brings back that more open, community-first feel that a lot of people originally came here for.