Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Content loses relevance over time, and becomes increasingly harder to retrieve as noise piles up: pointless threads, re-re-re-reposts, "marketing opportunities" (i.e. spam), so goes on. Reddit Inc.'s actions pissed off specially bad the people who were removing that noise - moderators.
Usually you'd have the contributors doing this; the lurkers don't care about sharing. But even if someone/something (AI) consistently keeps posting stuff from other platforms back into Reddit, those newer posts will be further removed from the original source, and they'll arrive later. Reddit stops being the "front face of the internet" to become "yet another bottom feeder of the internet".
In Reddit's case, I think that it does. Reddit might've started as a link aggregator, but its main value was as a forum platform. Without the ability to discuss anything deeper than "two plus two equals GOOD! EDIT WOW THANKS FOR THE GOLD, KIND STRANGER!@!11ONE", it's just yet another link aggregator again.
I agree and those reasons you listed are why I don't have any issue parting ways with this platform, but I don't think the general public does. People do use instagram and tiktok to view what I (and I'm guessing you do too) consider noise.
And after all, the general public is who views the ads on their site and brings in the money.
As someone who spends time curating the content I view without any care given to what other people enjoy, I'm often shocked at how terrible the content on something like youtube's front page is when I get logged out. It's easy to forget that a lot of people just don't care and use the internet to turn off their brain.
You're right that noise is subjective (it might be noise for one, content for another), but it's only partially so. Most people don't like old, repetitive or misplaced content; they don't like spam either, so those things are almost always noise. And yet I think that they'll become more and more common there over time.
You mentioned TikTok and Instagram; that's less about noise vs. content and more about high quality vs. low quality. Plenty people have low standards, but even those prefer quality stuff; so once content quality drops down (I'm predicting that it will), they'll have less reasons to look for content in Reddit instead of elsewhere.
Also, note that 47.58% of the traffic of the site is generated by "organic search". Once creators are gone, those 47.58% are going away, too. They won't be googling stuff like "how to shoot web site:reddit.com" if they know that Reddit will provide mostly junk results.