people actually challenged eachothers views (mostly) constructively

No, like I said, it’s an illusion among Redditors.

Upvoting, downvoting,

Both actively harmful due to the way human brains are wired. Putting pressure onto people actually having a spine, and provoking ape behavior from the rest.

Until one day spez and all the reddit mods decided to let their platform eat shit.

It wasn’t one day. Soft censorship in favor of China and Democratic party and what not became a thing much earlier.

There were places that circlejerked, no doubt about it, but what everyone fails to realize is that reddit was a place for pretty much everyone. So if you thought that subreddit was a circlejerk, feel free to join or make a different one. Like open source software getting forked.

They all very circlejerks of some kind. The paradigm works this way.

All these different social medias want us to be trapped in some sort of bubble through the illusion of choice. The short character limit is also what causes these sites to always be inferior to places like reddit and lemmy whether they like it or not. No one has a chance to fully expand on what they actually think or cite sources instead of being blasted immediately after their first post by getting blocked, cancelled, or moderated to oblivion.

Length of text and softness of moderation are good, but do not change the fact that any fool can write a long elaborate smart-looking text, that has nothing to do with honest discussion.