Reddit is a really good system for getting incredibly-niche oriented persons to subsume a subreddit, drive a bunch of engagement, yet suck all the usable air out of the channel, and make it next to impossible for a interested-but-casual user to meaningfully participate. Just like Twitter, the people who make the service their personality get to enjoy the network effects, and everyone else might as well be spitting in the wind.

What exactly are you advocating for here? People being less interested in things?

I think you know full well that I'm not advocating pEoPLE BeIng lESS iNTErESTEd in THiNGS. My idea would be to assign karma based on a logarithmic scale so that people with "just" an interest in the topic aren't immediately shoved to the bottom of the barrel by people with nothing but time to make the site their personality.

Benson Leung who is fairly well known for his USB C reviews is now a moderator of /r/UsbCHardware/ and through him I was able to fix a bug in the USB C specification. I have no idea how I would've done it without the connection Reddit provides.

Reddit wasn't "co-opted" by venture capital. It was built by venture capital!

It literally started as a result of the founders taking money from YC and pivoting away from their original idea and to Reddit at Paul Graham's request.

Hear the story here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/steve-huffman-co-found...

It probably depends on the niche. I've found reddit occasionally useful for this, but the community on reddit tends to be a bit monolithic, so I've not found reddit useful as a sole, or primary, source of this sort of thing.