Previously forums were mostly highly categorized and discussions had to be kept on topic as going off topic was considered incredibly bad etiquette. With yahoo answers there was only a few days for answers to post before the question asked had to judge best answer. Irrelevant and off topic responses were deleted as spam.
Since Reddit, and the way Reddit is, posts end up being buried after a few hours and if a discussion manages to start you can guarantee it will be diverted in the responses. This isn’t even restricted just to conversation on important conspiracies, such as what we need to do about the Jews (which would quickly get deleted anyway). Even some random kid asking for homework help on the Norman conquest of England will end up getting comments diverting the discussion to Putin and trans.
This has meant that it encourages people to learn to engage in disjointed and divergent thinking- previously a sign of mental disability.
Reddit was a small website in the beginning. Digg was the goto site on the Internet, similar to how Reddit is now but with less subs. The whole idea of Digg was the users would upvote the stories they liked. But people quickly worked out if they could game the website by buying votes or whatever they could drive enormous amounts of Web traffic to their sites. Power users and their network of friends basically took over all content submission on the site. The site transformed into advertising disguised as news and everyone knew it. The admins did nothing to fix it. People started to move to the alternative which was reddit. The final nail in the coffin was when the site owner just sold the whole website, making bank but destroying it entirely in the process. It still exists today but as a curated news site which was the opposite reason it existed in the first place.
Reddit for years I think escaped the worst of obvious cheating to drive traffic. Not saying it wasn't happening but not to the level it happened on digg. Part of the reason was that the site grew so big, to buy votes you'd need a lot of accounts. But then the 2016 election happened and the big boys moved in. Due to some campaign finance loop hole they were allowed to shill online and they had a budget of millions to do it. It wasn't even a secret correct the record detailed it on their website. But they absolutely fucked reddit in the process. It transformed it into the center of the online anti trump resistance where the front page was filled with obvious botted spam. And similar story the admins did nothing. I think the force driving the content also corrupted the entire admin team. Anyone that isn't a hard-core leftist is probably banned from all the major subs or shadow banned at this point. This leaves just the left wing crazies circle jerking each other. I think the obvious botted spam has reduced but they have radically shifted the politics base on the site. Subs like the politics one are probably entirely managed by some organisation like correct the record. The bias is so extreme there probably hasn't been an an article that wasn't negative towards republicans since 2017.
They banned whole subreddits for not being leftist, including the original ConPro. This site was originally solely a replacement for /r/The_Donald.
Yep, they got all conservatives in 1 sub the_donald, and then surgically removed it like a tumor, leaving only leftists crazies left. I think it was so bad they rewrote how the entire front page worked at one point to keep the_donald off of it.
American "conservatives" are a tumor and don't belong mixing in with normal people.