January 3, 2026
Welcome to the Rage Food Court
Reddit Has Become the Internet's Strip Mall
From niche gems to rage-bait kiosks, users say the soul’s gone
TLDR: After killing third‑party apps and chasing post-IPO engagement, Reddit feels like a strip mall of outrage and bots. Commenters split between “AI slop mall” despair and “still great niches” hope, debating real decline versus nostalgia—and why it matters for the future of online communities.
Reddit as a “strip mall” has the comments raging. One user flat-out snapped, “I hate this metaphor before I even hear about it,” while others nodded: the mall vibes fit a feed now packed with kiosk-level rage bait and copy-paste jokes. The crowd keeps reviving the API apocalypse—API (the pipes apps use to talk to a website) changes that killed beloved third-party apps and chased away power users—framing it as a grab for control and a post-IPO priority shift. Another chorus blames Google deals, calling Reddit an “AI slop source,” with bots farming karma like mall kiosks hawking phone cases.
People accuse the algorithm of chasing outrage, repeats, and hot takes over depth, pointing to the same top comments everywhere: a pun, “this is why we can’t have nice things,” and someone who didn’t read. Mods doing unpaid labor while Reddit profits sparked big anger; search being “broken on purpose” became a running joke. The drama even veered tabloid: someone dredged up scandal gossip just to match the food-court energy.
But it’s not all doom. A calmer crew insists Reddit still has great niche communities if you know where to look, though many whisper about Lemmy, Mastodon, and Discord as cozier alternatives. Nostalgia vs decline? The internet’s strip mall debate is officially open.
Key Points
- •The article claims Reddit’s 2023 API changes ended popular third‑party clients (e.g., Apollo, RIF), alienating power users and moderators.
- •It asserts that post‑IPO priorities favor engagement metrics over depth, with algorithms promoting outrage, repetition, and controversy.
- •The piece alleges widespread bot activity (karma farming, political pushes, AI content) that inflates metrics with limited enforcement.
- •It states Reddit depends on unpaid volunteer moderators while reporting $800M+ in annual revenue and has threatened protesting mods.
- •The article criticizes Reddit’s internal search as persistently poor and presents a theory that this benefits referral traffic; it points to Discord, Lemmy, and Mastodon as alternatives.