on the death of small subreddits

17 Feb, 2026

Before short form content and social media really took ahold of my brain, I was a fairly avid reddit lurker. To be honest - I still somewhat am.

The self organization of a subreddit being focused on (mostly) one topic and groups of people discussing said topic was a good system for browsing, researching, and digging into certain things, although that may be a slight bit of nostalgia talking. Even then, the so called 'circlejerk' was definitely visible on most larger subreddits. But I really enjoyed the smaller subreddits, subreddits that felt somewhat isolated to the normal trends passing through the larger ones.

Without sounding elitist, the smaller subreddits felt more like a community; on the right subreddit, you had posters with their own individual styles that you could recognize if you lurked enough, and there were metas about what was funny, what was acceptable and inside jokes. My school had an active subreddit that was uniquely shitposting based.

I can't put a finger on when exactly a shift happened. Maybe it's been a slow and steady decline in general.

At some point reddit became more of a mainstream website, and started becoming more of a social media. "Reddit wide" movements became a thing with the ellen pao and net neutrality posts, and more cross-reddit posts became a thing. Then someone figured out reddit was a fantastic place for political rally posting¹ as well as financial shilling². Then the pandemic rolled around, traffic spiked, and GPT was released.

While the other problems were preexisting, AI slop has truly been a death knell. Not only are there constant ChatGPT'd posts (which optimistically you can consider as letting non english speakers join in on discussions and pessimistically consider as completely fraudulent posting), but posts in 'drama' subs like /r/AITA are fed into short video generators (usually with some minecraft or subway surfers in the background) to be churned out for ad revenue. In fact, reddit is both profiting from bulk selling posts to labs as training data³ while serving generated content back. Model collapse, anyone?

This isn't to say that any of these problems (sans AI) weren't a problem before; in fact, reddit was never that original of a platform (hence it being an aggregator). But with them came the death of the small subreddit. Subreddits that are small and human are now a rarity, usually legacy subs that had a relatively structured history.

You could honestly type in any word into the search bar these days and get either a) a sub with 500k+ b) an AI astroturfing subreddit c) porn of some kind. There's no longer many public square type communities - many have migrated to discord⁴ or isolated forums.

Which is not to say that's a bad thing. Perhaps this is just the natural order of any social media website. Facebook saw similar declines, and even then a bedrock of boomers still use it as their mainstay. I just miss the platform of small communities, and I guess I'm tired of swapping platforms. Maybe you can't really recreate the magic of anonymous internet communities in the new era of the internet.

#somewhateffort