Around late 2005-2006 it wasn't so bad, it was more 20-something guys in tech. A significant enough portion of the articles on the front page were related to programming or tech-real topics (esp. startups), or long-read articles, and while there was bickering, there were also interesting discussions in comments that didn't get dragged down by trolls and teenage-boyness. By 2007 the kids ranting about politics and atheism, the image links that were just a picture of a slogan, the trolling, the lame joke accounts, and the rest were picking up steam, and Startup News was created as a less awful alternative by pg (and also as an Arc demo), which was eventually renamed Hacker News. There was an early reddit exodus to HN to get away from reddit's worst excesses in 2007-8, especially when the horrible Digg exodus to reddit was happening.
Probably true, I mostly stopped paying attention around 2010, so when I occasionally hit it now my subreddits are not highly curated to stay ahead of the horde.