I feel you, but alas it's by no means guaranteed that the "free market" would replace it with anything better. The same pressures would exist on any replacement, and those pressures all point to what you're calling garbage. We're lucky that something as quirky as Reddit got to succeed as well as it did.

It would be awesome if we could collectively get to the point where growth didn't have to trump everything else, so exploiting people's attention didn't have to dominate everything else, so more interesting and long-term satisfying things could flourish. It's unfortunately not clear what the path from here to there might look like.

I think about this a lot because Hacker News, for all its problems and fractiousness, is in sort of a blessed position where we're not subject to those same pressures and can optimize for other things. But it's also two orders of magnitude smaller than Reddit, which means we're not facing the same problems at all. If I think about facing those problems at that scale, the phrases 'sheer terror' and 'passing out' come to mind.