Reddit is anything but high quality.

That depends heavily on the subreddits you browse. There absolutely are places with high quality content, though it feels like they are getting sparser and sparser.

Old Reddit was.

Oh man, someone should train an LLM on pre-Digg death Reddit and modern Reddit and have them chat. It’d be a hoot.

"among the highEST" is comparative; it doesn't entail "high".

Not in that sense; high quality in the sense that there are a lot of actual, real people posting there, and those people tend to come from a pretty diverse set of backgrounds.

Perhaps on the smaller subreddits, but have a look at /r/all on any given day and it's obvious that real people, and diverse backgrounds, it is not. Every single subreddit that goes above a certain activity threshold collapses into the exact same state of astroturfed, mass-produced political slop targeted towards low IQ people.

Yeah, there is still a lot of manoshpere / rightoid adjacent content on Reddit. It used to be worse though.