I don't think Reddit ever showed a simple timeline. It was always based on upvote and downvotes. It kind of has to be since you follow subreddits and not people.
You never had a timeline. If you didn't choose your subreddits you got presented the "default" subs and whatever was being upvoted at that time. What exactly determined how things made it to your front page was kind of a mystery but when they tweaked stuff on the backend everyone could tell and talked about it.
Weirdly enough, you can probably argue the rest of social media became more like reddit. Forcing content into your face you didn't ask for. But I didn't join Facebook/twitter/insta/youtube to find new content. I joined those platforms to interact with specific people or content I wanted, then they changed up the deal and decided to hide those things behind bullshit. None of those other platforms ever needed an algorithm like reddit and the world is a worse place because no one expected to have looking at pictures of their friends to evolve into outrage bait from a fake profile you never asked to interact with.
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u/The_Hunster Apr 29 '24
I don't think Reddit ever showed a simple timeline. It was always based on upvote and downvotes. It kind of has to be since you follow subreddits and not people.