I think there's an interesting cultural weirdness about Reddit here. Part of the problem with brigading is that if you link to another post in another subreddit, you're already logged in and have exactly as much power to upvote and downvote and comment as you did on the subreddit where you came from. There's the entire "no participation" community-by-obscurity trick, where subreddit CSS hides voting links if the hostname is np.reddit.com (this is supposed to be used for translations into the hypothetical "NP" ISO-631 language), but the fact that it's a CSS trick points to underlying discontent.
On the other hand, Reddit is a great platform for small communities precisely because you're already logged in. I've never created a Lambda the Ultimate account and only think about it maybe once every six months, but I'm subbed to /r/types, so anything that flies by gets onto my Reddit home page.
I'm not sure how to reconcile these two problems. A client-side aggregator would solve the issue of visiting each independent site, but the shared login mechanism is also crucial, and is both a blessing and a curse.
First is realizing that there are technical solutions. Some people say "you don't want technical solutions to social problems" but the fact that subreddits have no protection against brigading at all is a serious design flaw with reddit[1].
Second is some way to require subscription for some period of time for votes to appear or to count. The CSS-hack stuff was silly, and as someone who has been on reddit since its first year, I have never seen the CSS-side of reddit because I never turned it on.
One of the big complaints from the blackout was the complete lack of tool support and this is an example. Reddit tried to paper over the technical shortcoming with rules and social hacks but once different reddit communities who didn't like each other realized there was a way to attack each other they did so.
[1] to be fair I wouldn't have realized it either if I was in charge of the subreddit design
It was disgusting and made me take a break from reddit immediately.
In particular, I'm subscribed to no general-purpose or wide-purpose subreddits. A few city/geographic subreddits mentioned it in passing, but, like, /r/programming or /r/nycbike or /r/radicalchristianity are going to treat any post about it as off-topic. You can't just post an advice animal about it, or request IAmAs from everyone involved, or say that today you learned whatever-it-may-be about Ellen Pao, or what have you. Nor can you do this about any other topic, which is why I bother to read these subreddits.
Then on r/all NSW/offensive are disabled by default (the same way NSFW is rigth now - you need to change your account settings).
Problem solved, FPH will never make it to people who don't want to see offensive staff.
And even among technology, I have no interest in seeing things about Ruby or Go. Again, it's not that I dislike the languages, it's that they're not professionally relevant to me at the moment so it's not what I visit Reddit for.
So what we need is some way for subreddits to be tagged with their own content: /r/rust about Rust, /r/python about Python, /r/sandersforpresident about Bernie, etc., and some /r/all equivalent that just matches what I'm interested in -- which is exactly what https://reddit.com is for me, right now. I don't need /r/all to be fixed; I have no interest in even seeing "all technology" or "all religion" or "all presidential candidates".
FPH being or not being on /r/all is irrelevant.
(I echo the comments that say that Reddit has great subreddits like /r/Haskell and it's easy to mis all of this when you are just subscribed to a few subreddits.)