This article partly discusses that Reddit isn’t a good source of info because it gets gamed a lot by bots etc. But clearly it used to be a good source, that’s why people were adding site:reddit to google searches. The article doesn’t go into how Reddit has gone downhill in recent years, partly because it relies on unpaid moderators. A lot of them got mad and left a year ago because Reddit effectively closed off their API and never provided moderation tools that were promised. This happened because the owners of Reddit just wanted to cash in quickly and monetize the community’s content, not improve the site.

So like almost everything else on the internet, Reddit is in a death spiral for short term gain. Death spirals usually take a few years so it will seem fine to investors for a while. Actually, google is in the same kind of spiral but has enough money and influence to prevent delay the inevitable crash from enshittification for longer.