To be honest, someone earning half a million a year, or even someone where $3.7 million isn't much money, doesn't tell me a whole lot about how much they know about anything. I'll agree, there's a chance someone earning a high salary has some in depth knowledge in their field.

Or maybe they're a manager with some good connections?

Or hell maybe they have in depth knowledge and they're a manager with good connections.

Maybe that commenter earning a low wage has spent their life immersing themself in that knowledge because they enjoy it but never made it a career.

The amount of money someone has doesn't necessarily correlate to how much they know about something.

Money comes and goes, having lots of it let's you have and do some pretty cool things, let's you not worry about necessities so much, let's you throw some weight around.

But I disagree it's a good indicator of how much knowledge a person has on a subject or that it automatically makes them a trusted authority on something.

What I'm getting at is someone's reputation on a subject is not obvious in Reddit-style forums, so while this does allow the promotion of comments by outsider savants, the vast majority of non-expert comments end up being from people who are good at being pedantic and exaggerating their understanding.

So you do get some outsider savants, and that's cool, but you also get endless waves of BS, superficial observations and contradiction for the sake of contradiction, while opinions from experts that are difficult to understand or digest get ignored (usually downvoted, unless they explicitly credential-drop).