Reddit Has Become the Internet's Strip Mall

The Mall That Was Once a Market

There's a particular kind of sadness that comes from revisiting a place that used to mean something. A neighborhood bar that became a chain restaurant. A bookstore turned into a bank. The bones are there, the sign might even be the same, but whatever made it worth visiting has been quietly extracted.

Reddit in 2025 feels like this. The URL works, the upvote buttons remain, the comment threads scroll endlessly. But somewhere in the optimization—somewhere between the API shutdown and the IPO roadshow—something essential was lost. Not broken, exactly. Hollowed out.

For nearly two decades, Reddit operated as a kind of digital flea market. Chaotic, often uncomfortable, occasionally brilliant. You could stumble into a corner where retired NASA engineers answered questions about spacecraft. Another where recovering addicts supported each other through the worst nights. Another where someone had spent three years documenting every train station in Japan.

The value wasn't in the platform. It was in the accidental collisions between strangers who cared deeply about strange things.

That market has become a strip mall. Clean, predictable, optimized. The storefronts still say "community," but the landlord sets the terms now.

The Breaking Point

On July 1st, 2023, Apollo went dark. Christian Selig's goodbye letter thanked nine years of users. What followed was instructive: millions of people suddenly confronted the gap between the Reddit they thought they used and the Reddit that actually existed.

Third-party apps had, for years, been quietly making Reddit usable. They filtered the noise, surfaced the signal, let people customize an experience that the official app seemed designed to frustrate. When Reddit announced API pricing that would cost Apollo $20 million per year—for an app that was free—the message was clear enough.

The protests that followed were unprecedented. Thousands of subreddits went dark. Moderators who had spent years building communities found themselves treated as replaceable labor. Reddit's response was to threaten removal, override democratic votes, and wait for the outrage to exhaust itself.

It worked. Within weeks, most subreddits reopened. The mods who stayed learned something about their position in the hierarchy. The ones who left took their expertise with them.

What the protests revealed wasn't Reddit's cruelty—it was the fundamental asymmetry of platform economics. Users create the value. The platform captures it. When those interests diverge, there is no negotiation.

The Algorithm Ate the Soul

Visit r/technology or r/science or r/worldnews today. Scroll through the comments. Notice how they feel interchangeable. The same jokes surface across different discussions. The same phrases. The same rhythms of outrage and deflection.

This wasn't always true. Each subreddit once had its own culture, its own vocabulary, its own unwritten rules about what belonged and what didn't. r/AskHistorians maintained standards that would shame academic journals. r/ChangeMyView developed protocols for productive disagreement. Small communities created elaborate inside jokes that made sense to no one else and didn't need to.

What homogenized them wasn't a deliberate decision. It was an optimization. The algorithm learned that certain types of content generate engagement—controversy, outrage, easy dunks, screenshots of tweets. It learned to surface those and bury everything else.

The communities that maintained their culture did so through active resistance: heavy moderation, strict rules, constant pruning. They survived despite the platform, not because of it. The ones that couldn't sustain that effort simply dissolved into the feed.

The Ghost Towns

Some subreddits died loudly, in protest. Others faded quietly, one unanswered post at a time.

There's a particular pattern to community death. The most active contributors leave first—they have options, other places to share their expertise. What remains are the casual users, the lurkers, the newcomers who don't know what the place used to be. Questions go unanswered. Spam increases. The moderators, burned out from years of unpaid labor, stop checking.

The subreddit becomes a ghost town: technically active, officially alive, but populated mainly by bots and newcomers talking past each other.

Reddit's moderation model always depended on a particular kind of person: someone willing to spend hours each day filtering content for free, motivated by love for a community rather than compensation. The 2023 protests revealed how Reddit viewed these people—not as partners, not even as employees, but as resources to be managed.

Moderator burnout was already endemic before the API changes. After them, it became existential. Many of the most experienced moderators simply left. The communities they had built for years were handed to whoever was willing to take over, or abandoned entirely.

We Are the Product

The timeline tells a story, if you read it right:

The pattern is straightforward. Years of user-generated content—the questions, the answers, the accumulated expertise of millions of strangers—became training data for AI models. The people who wrote it received nothing. The platform that hosted it received billions.

This isn't unique to Reddit, of course. It's the fundamental logic of platform capitalism: create conditions for users to generate value, then find ways to extract it. What makes Reddit's version notable is the timing. The AI deals came just as Reddit was preparing to go public—a convenient demonstration of monetization potential.

The bots that now populate the platform are, in a sense, doing exactly what Reddit needs them to do. They generate activity. They look like engagement. When analysts review quarterly numbers, a bot posting AI-generated content counts the same as a human sharing expertise. The system cannot distinguish between them—or perhaps it has stopped trying to.

The Bigger Pattern

It would be convenient to treat Reddit's decline as an isolated case—bad decisions by bad executives at one bad company. But the pattern is everywhere.

Twitter, now X, followed a similar arc: a platform that once hosted genuine conversation, slowly optimized into an outrage machine, then acquired and stripped for parts. Facebook transformed from a way to keep up with friends into an engagement-maximizing algorithm that happens to show you what your friends post. YouTube's recommendation engine pushes toward extremity because extremity generates watch time.

The logic is always the same. Platforms begin by enabling connection, then discover that connection alone doesn't scale. They optimize for engagement because engagement can be measured. They mistake metrics for value because metrics are what investors understand.

Somewhere along the way, the original purpose—connecting people who share interests, facilitating conversations that wouldn't happen otherwise—becomes secondary. What matters is time on site. What matters is ad impressions. What matters is the next earnings call.

Reddit isn't dying because of malice. It's dying because it succeeded. It grew large enough to require monetization at scale, and monetization at scale is incompatible with the organic, human, deeply weird thing it used to be.

What Comes After

The alternatives exist. Discord servers, Lemmy instances, Mastodon, niche forums that never left the old internet. They're smaller, harder to find, require more effort to join. That's not a bug—it's the only thing that protects them.

But there's a collective action problem. Everyone stays on Reddit because everyone else is on Reddit. The old subreddits still appear in Google searches. The new user doesn't know what's been lost because they never saw what was there before.

Perhaps this is just what happens to places on the internet. They grow, they optimize, they hollow out. The people who made them valuable move on. New platforms emerge, briefly genuine, before the same pressures take hold.

Or perhaps we're witnessing something more fundamental: the end of the platform era altogether. The teenagers who might have once joined Reddit are asking ChatGPT instead. Why browse a community when you can query an AI trained on all the communities that ever existed?

The irony is that the AI was trained on the very conversations that are now disappearing. It learned from the accumulated expertise of strangers helping strangers, in communities that no longer function the way they once did. The model absorbed the value; the source material withers.

There's a word for what we're feeling about the internet we used to know. It's grief. Not for something that died suddenly, but for something that changed so gradually we didn't notice until it was already gone.

The question isn't whether Reddit will decline—it already has. The question is whether the next generation of users will even bother showing up, or whether they'll accept a world where communities are something that used to exist, before the platforms consumed them.