Not that Reddit wasn’t, but it depended on the sub. Now it’s shaped by instance and everything here just feels stale

Been saying this for months. No one seems to understand what made reddit grow, and it is ironically very much like /r/place when you get down to it:

Reddit was a singular canvas that all users worked on together. Posts, comments, and voting shaped the site as a whole. The front page of Reddit was the result of it's userbase, and it's userbase was diverse. Because Reddit forced all users, of all backgrounds and ideologies, to exist together in the same space, and work on the same canvas, it created something living and varied.

You may not have ever gotten along with people from a certain subreddit in th comments, but I promise, the two of you worked together at one point to get a post to the front page or a comment to the top, and you didn't even know it. Thos little moments where diametrically opposed people shared a liking of something by how they voted. On the surface, everyone bickered. Under the hood, they were all unknowingly agreeing and cooperating all the time, and that was what powered reddit's engine: it's diverse userbase's activity.

That's why gated communities like Tildes and all these curated instances will never reach Reddit levels: they are starving the engine.