[duaneb]

Look at /r/askhistorians, which is probably one of the highest quality subreddits on the site. They moderate the subreddits tightly and decline being a default subreddit. With effective mods the friction with Reddit goes away. It is easy for me to see that community mods are terrible, especially on the default or topic subreddits.

/r/askscience is comparatively poor quality. Wrong answers are often given with no repercussion. Answerers are often entirely unqualified to answer question. This is arguably worse than no answer at all. I would not consider it a quality subreddit.

What you see on reddit is: people blowing gossip out of proportion on the subreddits who allow it. Those that "went dark" are probably the reasonable ones to avoid to avoid poor content.