I’ve had similar experiences in other subreddits, yep. Not so much things being removed, though. Instead I ask nicely for help with learning something and get fried with “you’re doing this all wrong, lrn2notsuck noob” responses, or I spend a good chunk of time on a thoughtful response to a question and it gets no votes or responses at all.
Some subreddits are notable exceptions, though—-those are the ones I’ll actually miss if this thing collapses. By and large, they’re small, very focused subreddits on particular topics; seems like once a subreddit reaches a certain size it just collapses into the above mess of behaviors.