Food for thought...
All the signals I am picking up on/using to differentiate a real or usable comment (sometimes paid ones can still be useful!) can of course be gamed the same way Google search or Amazon product reviews can. Reddit can also still be botted.
But in practice I am currently finding more success at home with information sourced from Reddit. That will no doubt change eventually, but right now, it is indeed better for me.
I hint at it above, but we all use Google for different things - buying things, finding things, getting information on a variety of topics. If I'm trying to do something like solve a technical or software issue, it actually doesn't matter if the result is gamed or not - what matters is if I solve the issue. Stackoverflow, Reddit and wikipedia results easily help me reach that end far more often than Google does, especially when Google doesn't seem to often surface the more obscure hobby forums that might have niche information.
This is not to say that there are no bots, paid shills and other issues on Reddit, but it is definitely a good filter. It's the same with Stackoverflow vs most coding sites that just rip them off.
The fact that this is the second reddit append tool mentioned on HN within a week means there is obviously something you are not considering.
It's not the same to look at HN's frontpage articles (or similarly the most upvoted comments) versus just randomly doing a text search for some obscure topic on HN and looking at whichever crap comes first. Specially when you use the very same search ranking algorithm you already complained tends to give crap.