No need for infernal advocacy here. Reddit is to some extent the unfortunate heir of newsgroups, as well as many independent forums, so of course there is going to be a lot of interesting and useful information on it.

The thing I imagine that gives some people such a negative view is coming in contact through the brand "reddit" and being dumped into large controversial sub-reddits straight away.

A lot of people bump into a particular sub-reddit through a search result and have no idea of the dumpster fires elsewhere on the larger "reddit" site.