My previous account is 14 years. My experience with Reddit was that it was really based around like hobbies IIRC. It was (without sounding cheesey) a bit more intellectual as there was no real alternative so people with niche hobbies would come and use it to discuss stuff super specific to a topic.

Most of my friends in senior highschool in 2010-2012 got into it, mainly due to our interests in geocaching and coding.

It was a lot less shitposty, less memes, bots, astroturfing and agenda posts, but it was a bit more dry and you couldn’t really spend countless hours just scrolling. It was more of a look at the front page which was much more dynamic to your specific interests. Look at your few favourite subreddits for a couple of minutes, then leave.

Then in like 2012-2015 it started becoming really, really political - and then it absorbed a lot of the Tumblr era content once it changed its policies (don’t remember what the exact change was). I think that because of the demographic that used it (mainly college age people) it skewed to the left a fair bit, and then once it absorbed small sites and become larger it attracted the typical online crowd.

Before comments, it was really just a news aggregator that felt a little more democratic. Like most of the internet in '06, more techy stuff made the page. Before subreddits, it felt like a single community of, well, nerds. I came over from Sensible Erection before the great Digg migration, and it was generally thought that the larger reddit got, the more fractured and low brow it seemed.