I've also been on reddit since before the major digg exodus. I did start out on digg, though. The thing which drove me to reddit in the first place was better c

I've also been on reddit since before the major digg exodus. I did start out on digg, though. The thing which drove me to reddit in the first place was better conversations and a relative lack of memes. By better conversations, it's somewhat hard to quantify but I think if you were to use a tool to analyse the reading level of an aggregate of posts on digg compared that to reddit, the reading level for reddit would have been higher. By lack of memes, memes weren't really as we think of them today. Digg was however filled with people posting ascii art in the comments because that was oh so hilarious /s. A common one was this, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pedobear https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pedobear, which I think is enough said. That behavior used to be downvoted into oblivion on reddit. Reddit isn't quite as bad as digg was, I'd say, but only because you can filter out a lot of the nonsense by curating what subreddits you're on. I've been looking for alternatives but it's not promising. The pattern so far has been for reddit to ban toxic subreddits, which then causes a flood of people into these nascent sites. Because they're small communities the culture of the toxic refugees quickly overwhelms the sites, which have tended to be built on the principles of free speech and anti censorship. Voat and Ruqqus are both good examples of this. I was an early member of both. They start out with a good group of people, and then devolved into far right extremist insanity. You can pick a random thread on either one of these sites and chances are good that someone will be complaining about black or jewish people in not so nice terms. It doesn't even matter what the topic is, that's what you're likely to find. I used to think that anti moderation was a good stance to have, but I don't think you can get such a site off the ground today without using a heavy hand. If you don't, you're going to sink into a well of toxicity which is impossible to escape from. Smart people are attracted to smart people, toxic people are attracted to toxic people. So I'm still on reddit. Like another commenter said though, if old.reddit.com stops working I think I'm done.