People ceaselessly cry about reddit and its moderation while anyone is perfectly free to start a community of their own and moderate it to their own heart's content. I've seen no real decline in reddit. It's generally the same mindless shithole it was 10 years ago, while the communities which have had steady moderation haven't changed at all.

The quality of individual subreddits has a very wide range, but it's the admin side of things that just get worse and worse. Anyone can create a community but you can't escape the way they run the site.

Over time more and more subreddits get shutdown for questionable reasons, censorship creeps in more often, long standing problems with moderation go entirely unaddressed (both in terms of problematic moderators/moderation and in terms of the lack of tools/resources available to moderators), transparency, communication, and integrity get worse all the time, nice features get removed, obnoxious new ones get added, etc. Even old.reddit.com is starting to become broken.

If you're lucky you can still find some great little subreddits, and maybe they'll even be allowed to stick around, too many good users won't get chased off, and they don't degrade in quality much as the site itself gets worse around them. There's still no good reddit alternatives but I'm still hoping we'll get one soon.

It’s somewhat intriguing how long they’ve kept old reddit alive. I had figured it’d get the axe fairly soon after they made the redesign the default, even if they claimed otherwise. I suspect there must be a contingent of users who are big contributors or otherwise important, who they believe will leave if they shut it down.

I suspect they have loads of data showing that contributors use old Reddit and cat video watchers use new Reddit.

And they haven't chosen to cater only to the watchers, yet.