> Reddit was knowingly ruined by google. Once google pushed reddit to the top of search results

Ehhhhh I agree and yet also disagree (it's fun though).

Yes they were ruined by being promoted by algo changes, but do I blame google directly? For me, no.

It's exactly as we stated before, it's because it was so trustworthy. Individual people's personal experience with X or Y many times with good details. That earned a lot of strong backlinks, blogs, etc. The domain became authoritative especially on esoteric searches. Then algo changes came (remember pandas?) and pushed them even further. I mean that's the point of search systems right? Get you to trustworthy information that you're looking for.

Then the money grabbers showed up.

So it's just like Harvey Dent said - either you die a trusted niche community or live long enough to see yourself become weaponized for money. He was so smart, that Harvey Dent.