Honestly it’s what there is to it…those are my biggest gripes with that. I recommend using old reddit or just the site and turning off notifications. If you use their app as they want you to use it, it’s bad…

I can tell you my personal experience with this.

•there’s a lot of content on the surface, but most of it comes from automated accounts and reposts. Posting anything on any subreddit is increasingly hard. Mods and users do what they can

•the anti spam automated system is off the roof, you can easily trigger that with a new account, and both mods and users can fall victim of that.

•the recommendation system is liquid filth. You touch a post once, now you’re getting flooded with content from that subreddit. You can turn off the recommendation system deep in the settings, certainly not in a user friendly context.

•notification galore: even if you turn off those recommended posts, those can be notified by the app (or via email) at any given time. So I accidentally interacted with some awful subreddit, now I’m getting said subreddit notified at 4 am. Not even kidding here. Not even tiktok dared to send me as much notifications as the reddit app/website.

•lots of hate speech. If you leave the good subs, you can find openly racist posts (muted shitpotlicssay after n-word posting, both in the title and in the comments) and extremism in general.

Unfortunately it’s still a useful resource for technical subs, which are still good, but reddit as a whole is fvched beyond belief.

It became useless partly due to the overmarketing and the reliance on ads, of annoyingly useless websites using SEO to stay ahead of legitimate resources (happened so many times now it’s terrible), but also for the aformentioned reason: everyone published on their social media (walled gardens) so they don’t appear on search engines. Particularly evident with dicord and facebook groups taking over forum. Well, they won’t ever appear on a search engine. Reddit is an exception, but nowdays it’s completely app-centric, the web ui is terrible (the app is even worse if you dare using it).

You can add a basic “-sitename” to avoid useless websites, for example you can format your query lile this: “search query -quora -pinterest -buzzfeed”

I’ve actually gone back to the old way, find a realiable site or publication and then add my links to the browser, very old school but still absoultely relevant. Also, since llm are a thing, i use the for extra searches with things like perplexity ai. I also appreciate chronological feeds, so that i am the one to pick and choose what to see and not some automated system that i don’t truly trust. With some exceptions, clearly.