It happened a lot before Reddit too. Forums always used to have this cycle of starting out appealing to more mature audiences before getting flooded with casual

It happened a lot before Reddit too. Forums always used to have this cycle of starting out appealing to more mature audiences before getting flooded with casual users and spammers and many people then moving elsewhere. Heck, in the world of webmaster forums, the ease in which they got filled with spammers and low quality content meant that the same people usually ended up being members of dozens of different forums and moving to a new site every month or two.