I completely disagree with some of the points here. There seems to be this weird assumption from people that Reddit is some organic source of information that hasn't been polluted by advertisers and SEO. But the truth is that it absolutely has, the difference is that the way you game the system is different. Google is this crazy algorithm and no one really knows how it works, so people just throw shit at it. Keyword spamming, link farms, etc. All this auto-generated content. It's much more difficult to manipulate Google, but as an algorithm google doesn't object to people trying. The result is an obvious explosion of rubbish that raises the noise floor.

Reddit is different, they don't have algorithms. They have moderators. You don't need to figure out some crazy complicated way of manipulate things, you just have to either bribe or trick a couple of unpaid part time staff. And we've seen this so many times - moderators who use their position for their own gain. Now the result is different, this is what's misleading. On reddit because it's all manually moderated spamming is heavily penalized. So you don't get the noise floor of rubbish content. What you do get though, is highly unreliable information about anything that could be monetized.

It's exactly the same way on twitter, your energy company will be perfectly happy treating you like crap and keeping you on hold for 3 hours, or your airline company will throw your bags into a skip in Timbuktu and tell you you're on your own. But suddenly if you have a following on twitter and complain you get the red carpet treatment. Why? Because they've found a very easy way of cheating their customer service reputation.