>The challenge is that what we think of as high quality content is not what Reddit Inc. has seen leading the growth. Images and fluffy content are easier to consume, and therefore more profitable for the site.

Which is fine, but you have to make some attempt and consolidating that type of content as much as possible. An example being to let /r/gaming run wild with the image macros and meme posts, but then rule those out on the subreddits for specific games. If you don't, you just end up with each game's subreddit becoming basically a filtered version of /r/gaming.

Absolutely. And the popular subreddits are already sort of pre-disposed to fluffy content due to their intended subject matter. I'm not saying the mods of r/funny should do anything, except maybe remove duplicate posts on the same day/week that content was posted.

But there are some subreddits that used to be good conversation hubs, that simply got overrun with trash because the moderators weren't paying attention, or were too scared to set up and enforce rules.