I more or less agree with everything you said. Reddit is going IPO in 2020 so they're trying to make themselves more marketable, but like you said, it's becoming much more of a "curated space" than a real-world community. So ironically as they try and clean up their image more and more, it becomes less and less appealing to normal people who find they don't fit in anymore.

Reddit's traffic is actually doing fine, but there is a lot of evidence that they are gaming their numbers. And if they're going IPO, and their company valuation is based on traffic numbers, why wouldn't they? During the 2016 election reddit was the #6 most visited site on the entire internet.

We hope here to have a space to agree to disagree, where people can say their part and not have to face the wrath of going against the reddit hivemind, as we have no downvote and the site is designed to lessen echo-chamber effects, including the addition of mod rules that limit the deletion abilities of mods instead of it being a free-for-all. You can read more information about this from the links in the footer of every page.

I had the same migration path from digg to reddit to saidit, and we are doing our best to learn from the lessons of the past.