Like circa 2007/8, Reddit was a community, and it was pretty great. I was friends with a big group of r/Chicago people, and we organized several awesome meetups. I still talk to some of them, and 2 of them even got married!
But then AMAs got Reddit national attention when celebrities started participating, things really blew up. Everyone came for r/AMA, but they stayed for r/funny and r/pics. Comment counts went from 20 to 100 top per post, to 100s or 1000s for all posts. Comment quality went from multi-paragraph, forum-like, insightful discussions that followed “Reddiquette”, to one line joke comments and downvotes for disagreements (whereas downvotes prior were only used to bury inaccurate/hostile comments instead). And then Reddit slowly turned into a boredom filler instead of a community site, where you just scroll to pass the time.