I stopped using Reddit a few years before the whole stupidity, because the culture was fucking with my head.
Then I did the Mastodons for two years or so, with Lemmy eventually entering the mix. And then as Lemmy got more users and content, it took over as my preferred platform.
You don’t want to use exceptions in normal control flow, because they’re extremely slow. Every time you
throw
an exception, it has to collect a stacktrace, which is hundreds, if not thousands, of calculations, compared to a handful of calculations for returning a boolean or an enum variant.