Yeah, that too. Weird how easily these things get forgotten. That means they got away with it. Probably pissed off a lot of people too, who I'd wager didn't stick around. Wonder where they went though.
It's often quoted that 80% of content is made by 1% of users, and usually those people are the first in, and if you lose them, it's over for you.
Generally forums as in phpBB stuff are fine - they are usually run by a reasonable bunch of folks who are interested in the continued success of the site, since they own it - there are some (well known) bad communities but at least usually you know what you're getting into.
On the other hand, reddit mods can be forced upon a subreddit and they come and go - they get their fifteen minutes of power as they get to terrorize the denizens of another internet community, and they move on, anonymously too.
From the communities I was around some went to discord, but most did not really stick and discord is not very suitable platform for stuff like that imo. There were also some reddit clones popping up at the time, but they were politically charged just to another direction of what reddit was taking, not really spaces to hold that diversity and nuance either. Some also moved on to some other subreddits that would draw less attention of specific kind. In time afaik the old communities faded away or broken to smaller pieces, fragmented into smaller echo chambers and the ones not fitting in any of them just moved on. There are not really places to hold nuance in the internet now. What I liked in reddit was that you would get all people coming from all these different references at the same place and sometimes indeed interesting things would happen in that intersection.
And thing is, the internet was already largely shit at that point. I guess there is no specific time point to point when the internet broke because it seems it can always break more.
> It's often quoted that 80% of content is made by 1% of users, and usually those people are the first in, and if you lose them, it's over for you.
Maybe why meta pushes ai content creation so bad.