If I had to guess, this is what happens when you make your company data driven at all costs. All the dog-piling leads to higher engagement, more comments made faster as people get the last word in, and more gold/platinum/silver buying as people foam at the mouth to super-bump comments they agree with.

Reddit has a strong incentive to make their website a platform where you shout into an abyss that echos back what you currently feel, where you can feel vindicated for downvoting and insulting the "other", and get that sweet dopamine kick for stealing (not sharing) content with no concept of attribution. All of that means higher engagement of the userbase.

If they wanted to encourage thoughtful discussion? That would mean requiring long-form posts, or throttling how fast users could comment. Wanting high quality discussion would mean encouraging posting sources and taking time to read them, which drives users off the site. It would mean dis-incentivizing the emotion-based vector for buying gold as a means to super-bump arguments you agree with, or to spite the opposition.

Have you read Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman? If not, give it a read. ^^

> They are literally making the same exact mistakes,

I haven't seen them make a formal system whereby publishers can pay to have their content autosubmitted and promoted to the front page. That was what killed Digg.

Reddit doesn't need this system there are plenty of vote farms that you can pay a miniscule amount of money to and they will do it for you.

Ok..yes I'll admit I never even knew that Digg did that.

I thought Digg's vote system was simply being gamed by bad actors. The idea that someone at Digg thought it would be even a reasonably good thing to have the system you describe is totally bonkers.

Nice little summary here https://searchengineland.com/digg-v4-how-to-successfully-kil... It was really was an astonishingly cack-handed set of decisions.