I think you're giving Reddit too much credit. The frontpage is awash with astroturfing, agenda posts, and an obvious bias being curated by a handful of power mods. Sure, minor or niche subreddits can escape this, but that's probably only because they are non impactful to begin with.

"Flairing" posts doesn't do much good either, because the vast majority of users don't filter. I wonder if this actually makes things worse because the people who would downvote and present counterpoints have opted out of seeing such posts - furthering the echo chamber.

The real power of Reddit is to manipulate perception by a barrage of likeminded content, displayed over and over again to people who don't have their ideological defenses up because they're just browsing casually.