I joined Reddit a decade ago, back then it was still decent and very usable. But now? It's trash. I think you missed the train on this one and joined or started this too late. It really went downhill like in the last 2 years.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any real alternative otherwise I'd of joined one by now.
Reddit is an absolute cesspool. Tried to use it a couple times, and between entitled mods, nonsensical rules and it's users necessities to inject politics in everything I couldn't force myself to keep using it. Have you guys thought about running a poll and finding out in what platform the readers would be more inclined to form a community around?
I'm glad it's not just me. I signed up for an account recently to post on a topic and got shadowbanned for no good reason, despite trying to be helpful. Tried to appeal, no change, I can't seem to post on anything as now there is just a blanket ban. One of my posts that was still up there got reasonably popular, and then it asked me to cross-post that post to different communities, but every time I tried it gets immediately banned by reddit's filters.
What might be the world's most popular forum appears to have rather hostile policies towards new users, with support basically unreachable and rules on what exactly newly created accounts can or can't do unclear at best.