[nilkn]

It's crucial to mostly ignore and unsubscribe from the default subreddits. If there's a topic you're interested in, try to find a small subreddit dedicated just to it. My personal reddit homepage looks virtually nothing like the default, and indeed whenever I accidentally view the "popular" feed I'm shocked at what the site devolves into if you don't manually curate your subscriptions.

[unethical_ban]

Yep. Look at woodworking, sailing, overlanding, etc. and you'll find people who care about their hobby and are knowledgeable.

Some popular subs can have good content, too - askreddit has a good topic once or twice a month, and depthhub (used to) have good curation of deep learning.

[dsfyu404ed]

>Yep. Look at woodworking, sailing, overlanding, etc. and you'll find people who care about their hobby and are knowledgeable.

I disagree. Those subs are chock full of people who suffer from "expert beginner" symptom. The real experts have moved on to communities with a higher bar of entry (mostly forums). You can't have real in-depth discussion about technical subjects when you're constantly getting buried by people who are mostly trying to score internet virtue signaling points by pointing out that their table saw is old and lacks the most modern safety features or that they're not using jack stands. Forums (or 4-Chan, or anywhere else with linear, non-ranked discussion) doesn't have that problem. Once you're above the lowest common denominator in any sub there's little left to gain because you can't reliably interact with people who are at or above your level (because those people get drowned out so they start keeping their mouths shut or leave entirely).

[smacktoward]

It's because Reddit displays the upvote totals. Anytime you set up something that looks like a scorekeeping mechanism, people are going to start treating it like a video game and chasing high scores, with all the attendant showboating and bad behavior that leads to.