Glad to see this as the top comment. I was a "Digg refugee" to Reddit, and I do remember a lot of outages with V4, but just like you, I remember thinking more clearly "Why would I wait a long time for this page to load when all that comes back is spam." It was the most useless, uninteresting set of basically ads that I could think of. Imagine if Reddit had no interesting user submitted stories but was instead 100% of some of their worst ads that try to use "Reddit meme language". It was pathetic and sad.