I increasingly think that upvote/downvote culture is the worst thing to happen to the internet and the world at large.
The problem is I don't have an alternative solution to propose.
Your comment is spot-on in my opinion though - I usually start with Reddit results, but try to check against other sources before relying on it.
A forum that's meant to be 100% about humans talking to humans doesn't need an API, so why does it expose one?
Also the model of user-created and user-moderated subreddits actively enables the creation of shill accounts. It's trivial to create a subreddit and use it to farm karma with a ton of bots. If you can keep real users from ever entering your walled garden of a subreddit (of which there are many) your bots will never be detected until you wipe their comment history and set them loose on the rest of the site.
There is so much shilling on Reddit if you knew it would blow your mind. I wish more people realized this. Reddit is the best place to shill because not only is it ridiculously simple, people also automatically assume you’re not shilling, and then once you seed the idea, everyone else will do the shilling for you indirectly.
The healthiest way to use Reddit is like Wikipedia: assume the information you’re reading is highly compromised and biased in one way or another, but use it as a starting point in your further research and it’s a great tool.
Reddit posts are not your friends. Upvotes do not mean the contents of the posts are legitimate or not shilling.
Reddit is the best place to shill and the sooner the non-shillers figure that out, the better off the entire internet will be.