I feel like Hacker News is one of the only online communities I've participated in where the score is handled appropriately. It's a good personal measure of how well my posts and comments were received by the community, but it's not bragging rights. No one else can see my vote tallies here, so I have no real incentive to increase it.

I've seen this affect sites like Stack Overflow as well. At the bottom of any popular question are usually very low-effort answers from posters who really shouldn't have answered at all. I wonder if it's an example of their otherwise well-executed reputation system creating noise that might have been avoided.

This can be solved by moderation. Not voting, old school approach of moderators removing things. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ still has quite a high standard, and that's because they have strict moderation.

You can't have "democracy" and "voting" and "algorithms" and then have high content.

A quick search finds at least two GNUS backends for reddit.

It does support RSS quite pervasively. Tag ".RSS" to the end of any URL (before the arguments), and you'll get a feed.

Subreddits, users, posts, searches, and a number of other elements.