Slashdot is the pre-cursor to digg and reddit in a lot of ways. It’s problem was people wanted freedom to create communities and submit posts whereas /. wanted to be able to control what appeared on their site. Both digg and reddit were responses to that aspect of slashdot. That, and their moderation system tried to be democratic, sharing the load amongst users, rather than installing mods (which ultimately was a failure imo).
I’ve had my account on reddit for well over 17 years, was in the first 1000 users to register, but regardless of what they do I’m mentally working thru deleting it. I will soon.
Reddit in 2005/6 felt much like this place is now.