I know what Reddit was. I was a moderator for a sizable sub for many years lol you’re not going to get any disagreement from me there. None of what you wrote above is incompatible with what I wrote. You need to think of it in relative terms. I am not saying that Reddit is some truly authentic experience, far from it. But if you’re looking for legitimate answers to your hobby/technical/fandom questions, name a site that comes even close that 1) isn’t exponentially worse/more corporate dominated and/or 2) is actually big enough to get responses.

Discord is the next closest thing because of how servers are set up but it’s a terrible repository for information because you need to be invited (no google searching/indexing) and structurally you can’t find anything that’s more than like 5min old.