It goes deeper than that. What happened was a hugely tiny minority of very loud people festered in Tumblr and Reddit, and Reddit became the single most censored site on the internet, eclipsing China. The number of censorship actions individually in 2012 to 2016 eclipsed China, just on Reddit alone. And nobody wants to say that or even acknowledge it or even look at it, and we're on an internet site about communications on the internet, and not a single person has ever stated that fact. They destroyed Reddit; that's the dead internet theory. Reddit is back to faking it, but there's never going to be a chance to kickstart something like Reddit. That's why they're actually trying to resurrect other websites now.So this tyrannical mob of minorities destroyed Reddit, and now they have to metastasize and they have to go to other places. So they ironically started using other websites, but actually that's just because they found new ways to get that dopamine hit of controlling other people's behaviors and actions through censorship, and that's what drives them. So you're right; people quit, but wherever they go on any site, basically, there's no safe spaces left for free speech; there's only safe spaces left for censorship.
Brain rot and content don't even come into the equation. That's just throughput. I think we hit peak conversation around about 2017, and I think the well-known surface area where people can actually write coherently in a way that gets read got erased, and now it's balkanized in substacks and short-form video, and everything that used to be comment is now commentary, and you have to talk, you have to listen to some bobblehead talking, and then the comment section is nothing; nobody reads it; there's no conversation happening anymore. And that was deleted by the tyrannical minority who took every surface they could and destroyed it.