Reddit is highly addicting but usually brings me little joy. Most of the time when I'm just browsing the front page I don't laugh or learn anything particularly

Reddit is highly addicting but usually brings me little joy. Most of the time when I'm just browsing the front page I don't laugh or learn anything particularly useful. But in a web full of bots and SEO blogspam, it's refreshing to have a place that is predominantly filled with content and comments by real people. Sure, it has tons of low effort posts and comments, but it's one of the few places on the Internet where you can ask a question about nearly any topic and get tons of answers from real people, and due to its voting system, in certain subreddits about specific enough topics, quality answers rise to the top. As a tool, Reddit is indispensable due to how bad SEO spam has gotten. If I want an answer written by a human who probably has no financial incentive to lie, adding site:reddit.com to my searches is by far the quickest way to do so. For certain topics, it's not just the quickest, but the only way certain information can be found. If Reddit dies or (more likely) becomes useless due to poor moderation, it's not hard to imagine us entering a new chapter of the Information Age. Many local newspapers no longer exist, and many magazines covering more niche topics have also shut down. People gladly share their experiences and discoveries on Reddit because they know many people will see it (easier to get motivated to write long posts if you know someone will read them.) Will people be willing to put that effort into writing on their own blogs? Many won't, as no one will even know it exists (before you could share your blog on Reddit!) Even if someone still goes through the effort of writing quality content on a blog or self-hosted site, again, it will be very difficult for anyone to find it due to SEO spam. This is such a stupid situation they've put themselves in. I get that they want to show ads, but I don't think ads not being shown is why people use 3rd party apps. On desktop, I'd rather use old.reddit.com with ads than new Reddit without ads: new Reddit is buggier, slower and shows less content. And they trivially could have added the features mods wanted that are offered by the 3rd party apps. No one would use 3rd party apps if the official one wasn't so slow, buggy and lacking. I understand the advantages of not having so much of the Internet's content all on one site, but I'm just not convinced the average user is going to switch to decentralized/federated/peer-to-peer social networks. People may stop using Twitter, but most of those former users aren't going to start using Mastodon. Likewise, people may stop using Reddit, but I don't think they're going to start using Lemmy or any of the other alternatives. As far as random forums go, discoverability is going to be an incredibly difficult, and in any case it's far easier for a user with little technical knowledge to start a subreddit vs starting and maintaining a forum. I dread to think how much of my life I've wasted on Reddit. But for all its faults, I think it has added a lot of value, and I think the Internet would be a worse place without it.