Just checked on old.reddit. Can still see comments with negative votes.

Hardly just my experiences. Zero quality control when it came to content, the sub was often full of reposted random tweets from bit-part actors from the 90’s, often not even talking about ST, or trashy shit like playing fuck/marry/kill with the cast of DS9, but at a certain point it got turned into unpaid PR for CBS/Paramount, where you couldn’t make even light-hearted jokes about any currently broadcast show. Everything and anything would be struct down with some “be constructive” rule that translated to toxic positivity and users functioning as little more than advertisers for the shows, that sub was basically a test bed for the enshittification of reddit as an advertising platform, and trying to discuss it with the mods just got you a bunch of smarmy smartarsery in return. They’re pretty much every 90’s stereotype of a ST fan running a chatroom.

If you looked at any of the other ST-related subs, you used to find no shortage of people with similar stories. I’m sure many of them were neckbeards in their own right who just raged against any and all new ST stuff, often with weird political bents, but given I’m not one of them and still got bullshit from them, I’m guessing a fair few of them had valid grievances too.

Startrek.website seems to be run by the same people who ran r/startrek, some of the most ridiculous, petty, power-tripping stereotypes of neckbeard reddit mods you could find. Not that familiar with the other two, but lemmy.world seems to be run by reasonable people just trying to do their best.

Public warnings are bullshit, anyway. They post a reply, warning you for saying something you didn’t say, often /u/ mentioning you, then delete the original comment to cover their tracks.

Maybe I’m just weird but I think the tech focus is better.

Like that’s where all this started. Kevin Rose wanted a better version of Slashdot, a tech news aggregator, so he created Digg.

And Digg was about tech news for several years before going to a general format, at which point it became trash.

And then Digg’s redesign killed the site and everyone flocked to a Digg clone called reddit, even though reddit was a clone of post-shittification Digg, not pre-shittification Digg.

Being tech-focussed really does help. I’d sooner deal with Well Actually neckbeards than the average Facebook user, even if I’m not just interested in tech news.

Forums worked really elegantly when you had an active userbase of maybe a couple of dozen people a day.

Megaforums… not so much.

This was my first thought as well. My second thought is all the harms we’ve caused to ourselves in the digital age, and we only start to care when it hits our pocketbooks.