Yeah Reddit, in addition to having fallen to become a toxic hellhole imho (really wish I did not have to say that but... it's true so there it is), also became just EXHAUSTING to try to keep up in. Even an hour or two after a post came out, in the larger subs, the stream of comments got so long that you felt like you couldn't comment at all in it, unless you'd read through all the others first. Or worse, by the time you wrote out a response, others had said similarly but it looks like you ignored them - technically you did at that point I suppose, despite it not existing at the time when you started (which got MUCH more complicated if e.g. you started writing before your work day, then wanted to finish at the end of it, rather than write it all out in one go).

But ad revenue must always go UP so... screw whatever might help promote helpful discussions, and instead make something that encouraged the quickest of tweet-style short replies ("I also choose this guy's wife", "I too also choose this guy's wife, also", "likewise, I similarly choose to partake in this guy's wife as well" - I mean okay, we get the joke, it doesn't need to be repeated twenty times in a row as a response to the same identical comment reply): i.e., people were trained to speak rather than listen.

Here, people still can do that, but the training component is absent, and the fact that it's smaller makes it much less incentivized to do so.