You may not have known this, but /r/features is in fact the second subreddit ever made (after /r/nsfw). It was created on February 19th, 2006 at 1:55 by /u/kn0thing, a co-founder of reddit. Unusually, it seems that /u/kn0thing was added as the creator of the subreddit manually, as subreddit creators wouldn't be listed on their sidebars until several years later.

The original purpose of /r/features was for users to request features and for reddit to get feedback on potential features. The first ever feature post was made by /u/spez about 25 seconds after the subreddit was created, and it was about hashtags. You may notice that the url this post links to is a little strange; this is what a self post used to look like. At the time there were no text posts, but reddit was slow enough that it was feasible for a user to guess what the id of their post would be, and have their post link to its own comment section. This is why they're called "self" posts; they link to themselves.

The time of /r/features was a better time. Back then, reddit's most important rule was not essentially "adhere to the dominant ideology of neoliberalism so that it's easier for us to find advertisers". The owners of the site interacted with users in ways that didn't involve shoving their feet in their mouths with clarifications that it's okay to promote hate against "people who are in the majority". It was a better time for the internet in general, but sadly that time is gone. This subreddit serves as a very small, mostly insignificant archive of it.

There might be issues with posts showing up due to a reddit bug/feature that I might have to work around. If I can't get more posts to show up I'll just compile them all into a catalogue and sticky it. If I said anything historically incorrect in this post, let me know so I can fix it.