Why Reddit Kept Its Rules When Everything Else Didn't

Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift · Mar 10, 2026 · 9m

Social media doom scrolling used to mean wasting time. Now it means being marketed at by people you never followed, on behalf of products you never asked about, in a feed that looks nothing like what you signed up for. You did not change. The platform did.

Reddit was supposed to be the weird corner of the internet for people who never see the sun. Somewhere that changed. The upvote and downvote system still works. The communities still moderate. A turquoise Magic card sleeve ad does not appear in your feed because you said something near your phone. You go there and you find what you went…