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i don't understand how its the most popular internet forum, the moderators are some of the most disgusting people i'v ever seen (even worse than /pol/ /b/ users)
and the community is toxic, hypocritical and extremely hateful against anyone who disagrees with mainstream narrative, while excusing this behavior in the name of "tolerance"

the mods don't follow the site's own rules and just ban people on personal whim. i was banned from the r/ukraine sub after making a thread asking about Azovite's nazi origin with the reason being "im just sick of people like you asking about nazis in azov"
and after replying that it's not fair because i didn't break any rules they just replied: "being rude won't get you unbanned, you better apologize"
so basically they expect everyone to grovel and kneel before them just so they can get off on their pathetic power trip
was also perma banned from r/rant and the mod messege was: "lol suck a dick you conservative shithead"
because i made a thread ranting about the unrelenting hatred conservatives get on the site to be hypocritical. (i was being civil mind you, unlike a rant that outright said: "conservatives aren't human to me, i wish they were all dead" which naturally got 10k upvotes and like 150 awards)

which is a nice segway to the toxic and hateful community, openly admit you're a conservative? enjoy -100 karma just for saying that.
said something pro religion? -50 karma and like 10 replies that call you an idiot for believing in an imaginary friend.
someone randomly said that all trump supporters are filthy racists that support putin, you can at least tell them that is wrong right? NOPE -200 karma, enjoy all the "ha ha racist snowflake mad" posts you will be getting in your notification feed for the next half-week.

i know the focused subs like dedicated game/movie fandoms and special interests can be good, and i do enjoy my time in them, but reddit as a whole just just a god damned cesspool that functions more like twitter.
how did this atrocity became the most popular forum on the internet? is there any hope for it?

The universe is compensating for 4chan being a far-right circlejerk where dissenting opinions arent allowed either I guess

It's the powermods. And the corrupt, ineffectual admins who endorse them. From what I can tell, the majority of subs that are the way you described are run by powermods. Blatant mod abuse and communities more toxic than an abandoned Taco Bell bathroom are inevitable when most of the people running them are also involved in hundreds, if not thousands of other subs. It's one gigantic, site-wide circlejerk.

Just by the fact that even the most dedicated basement dwellers are still bound by human limitations, I don't expect that your average powermod is actually actively moderating most of the subs they're in. That's just as bad as if they were active in all of them, though, since this means that a huge amount of subs have at least one person with massive power who could fuck shit up on a whim whenever they desire, and get away with it.

Reddit has become an informal social experiment to see what would happen if you let corruption and clique behavior go unchecked for years on end. The results aren't pleasant.

Always has been. When your site became popular because of refugees from another dying site, it was doomed to fail.

Trust me, they sometimes have good reasons for it

Have you ever heard of the incels subreddit it was hellish

that explains that mod problems, but i still dont understand how the community ended up being so toxic, and if the mods are so vile how is the site so popular? by now you'd expect a new big forum to compete with reddit

It's not that toxic, it's just seems more toxic to you cause it's toxicity is leftwing, I mean what are we comparing it to? Twitter? 4chan? Tumblr? iFunny? They are all a cesspool
or where one really

well in all these other places people aren't instantly insulted when they say unpopular political opinions, they are usually debated in some way, at least fist

Yeah that is true, reddit is very dismissive never been a fan of that.

Still most websites have something fucked up about them, but yeah I see your point

So I could give you the same answers ou have already (the site is shit, the internet is shit, wah mods bad, US politics etc.) but if you wanted to be precise about it, there are a few key items in Reddit's story that mark its downturn in quality (Ronald Reagan moments, if you will).

Spaghetto's post is actually closest to the truth in that moderator behaviour and increased clique behaviour are responsible for a huge increase in how polarized the site is as a whole. You can find plenty of videos going into detail about the toxic and biased nature of Reddit moderation, like this video

The other factors boil down to increased financial interest in Reddit and its vulnerability as a platform for astroturfing and propaganda. It's pretty difficult to find this kind of content – half because it's swimming in an ocean of shitty clickbait "WOW REDDIT SCANDAL" and partly because Reddit itself will remove said content, but there was a minidoc called Reddit for Sale that went into it. The video is private now, but its archived description has links to plenty of the resources it pulled from.

The short version of it is that Reddit likes money more than it likes its users, and its tragically easy to abuse the site for content manipulation or outright advertising. This is the reason you'll see many small, niche communities have 0 issues with Reddit as a whole, wheras large but seemingly benign ones (think subs for cute animals, gaming, "mildlyinteresting", that sort of stuff) feel bloated and disingenuous.

TL;DR money and power

The format of the site doesn't help either.

Hiding/silencing dissent is very easy between the layout and how voting is handled.
It's fully embraced the "upvote/downvote" system you see on many sites and we all know how flawed those are. Makes forming circlejerks very easy.

I mean kym isnt that far off either, it gets very close to turning into a rightwing circlejerk at times AND might still turn into one just saying.

I mean I am not really defending Reddit, there is a lot of misandry there at times and dear lord you are not allowed to challenge it but I am just saying.

That's sadly Reddit for you, I've seen people get banned with 0 warnings and those who believe they are the absolute power.

Yeah. I've noticed lately that reddit is just loaded with terrible posts on r/popular most of the time. Some of the communities I've joined in can also get pretty anoying as well. Complaining can pretty much spread like wildfire in a sub and degenerate fast. It's times like that where I'd rather either come here and look a at posts for a bit or just go somewhere else.

I'm in a subreddit called r/CenturyClub, which is a forum you can only get into by having over 100,000 net karma in either comments or posts and then petitioning to be let in.
Functionally, it's a giant circlejerk clique for powermods and anyone who can stand them. I have little use for the place except to gawk at the people running it.

Short version, it's a bunch of out-of-touch arrogant bastards who think they're hot shit having funny interactions with each other.

Oh, wait. I think I just described KYM…

I just can't stand the self-righteousness in some of the subs I browse. I think the only one's I browse nowadays pretty consistently is AskHistorians.

It's as much of a shithole as every other popular/high-traffic website on the internet is nowadays; it's hardly unique in that regard. Cultural and virtual globalisation has lead to homogenisation of niches and people online that have no business interacting.

If it were up to me, I'd forcibly drag the internet back to the state and mentality it was in back in around 2004 -- long before politicisation, corporations, irony and sheer numbers reduced it to its current sad state.

Most reddit moderators are like cuckoo birds: nest invaders.

As everyone else here has already said this toxicity has been part of reddit for a long time now the least you can do is to just go with the flow

Going to r/Ukraine to ask about the Azovites was not a wise move these bastards are unironically seen as "heroes" there

It's one gigantic, site-wide circlejerk.

It's a gigantic, internet-wide circlejerk. The humongous PR firms that run "strategic communications" (trolling and censorship) for governments took over all of the biggest sites on the internet and started enforcing the contracts they were getting from Russia, Qatar, Pakistan, etc. No one will touch them because they are "intelligence".