Exact same for me, the re-design and the official app were major red flags but since they kept old.reddit and my 3rd party app (RIF) I was still happy even though the community of reddit was obviously degrading... I feel like having an alternative that is viable that is completely free of the commercial trappings such as lemmy here is something that is super appealing to me. I think lemmy is still in a very early phase and I am glad to be here to see what happens.

"new" reddit and a focus on showing images and video really changed the site. /r/All was often entirely posts with images/video and comments are often just reaction-comments. It really solidified the trend towards a "TLDR" site. I guess they figured their biggest competitor was 9gag or something.