My guess is with the protests that some of the top content creators moved away and never came back.

I remember sorting by hot once gave a wide variety of things and now it seems to be more drama posts like AITA posts.

Although it feels like I’m still following an ex, There was one place over there I used to visit a lot and I believe if you took a snapshot of the top ten posts of a random day few years ago and today, they’d be very different. Today’s seems to be a group picking up a trend and running with it and before it was more original content. I remember going there because I knew there’d be something new I’d likely laugh at or be amused by and now it feels heavily recycled.

The subscriber count is still way up, but I’d you look at the online/active user count, it feels like its around 10% it was off recent highs.

It felt like the sub had a ship of thecleus moment where it seemed to just be growing, but was also losing people until the group changed but the name was the same.

Someone else said the new reddit gold allows people to receive real money* if people gild their posts (by spending real money) * receiver must be in certain countries.

I saw a post recently on a wholesome memes page where someone tagged repost sleuth bot and someone else commented that todays post was literally a copy of the third top voted post of all time. It was.

I also remember that bot support got affected and this led to a spam detector bot being moved from active development to sunset mode where it was still supported but not actively enhanced.