There were three huge changes to Reddit culture that I noticed. I might have these out of chronological order, but that's not material to the changes themselves

There were three huge changes to Reddit culture that I noticed. I might have these out of chronological order, but that's not material to the changes themselves. The first was when posts started showing thumbnails. This made image content much more viable. Unfortunately, while there's plenty of awesome image content, it's also one of the lowest-effort routes for "shitposts" (the definition of which is left to the reader). The second was the growth of subreddits. This allowed the community to split and silo itself. As a clichéd example, you can pick your left-wing politics subreddit or your right-wing politics subreddit, and you never have to mix with the other, bad one! And the third was the death of Digg, which sent a huge influx of people Reddit's way. That one's got a lot of folk mythology behind it and little hard data, so I'll say no more.