Excerpt:
Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.
Sports radio is usually terrible though lol. Sports stuff is a legitimate hole here (compared to reddit), but I also have to imagine it's much more resource intensive to host/moderate. Game threads routinely get thousands or tens of thousands of comments -- it's a bunch of people in there for three hours straight -- and people yell at each other over sports all the time.
so how is random redditors talking sports better than sports radio?
It's usually not, you're right. Reddit sports forums -- especially team specific ones -- are dominated by sports radio type garbage takes.
But you also have at least some people on reddit who are trying to go deeper, or who have more perspective, than your drunk uncle yelling at the TV. So it's a lot of shit but a decent amount of good, where sports radio is almost all shit.