It’s hard to put my finger on the exact problems but it feels worse than the typical decline of large subs.
This thread posted today in response to the protest shows a lot of what I mean: https://old.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/14cbtjv/who_here_is_in_favor_of_just_replacing_these_shit/
Mob mentality, selfishness, scapegoating, lack of critical thinking… It’s just so toxic compared to where it was even a year ago.
I’m excited at the prospect of building a more positive, welcoming place here to discuss the NBA.
I think it is just literally the usual decline of a large sub. You always get low effort and drama bubbling to the top as the userbase grows.
Reddit itself became too popular and attracted too casual crowd and too many of them. I never thought there would be a popular celebrity gossip subreddit, but they have several now.
Yeah, /r/NBA turned into a very tmz style discussion board. I’m not sure how much of that correlates with the rise in social media of players sharing at times too much personal info. But, instead of basketball focused topics it started becoming lot of gossip, and there was no flair for those either to make it easy to curate it out with third party apps or RES.
I used Reddit for ~12 years and I saw it constantly. Most of my favorite subreddits are a shadow of what they used to be 5-10 years ago; I don’t think I realized how soulless everything there feels until I started using the Fediverse.