Reddit, like Usenet, or IRC, is just a collection of individual communities that happen to share an identity system. Expecting the (not-logged-in) Reddit front page to be “intellectual discourse” would be like expecting a random selection of Usenet posts or IRC chat-lines to be “intellectual discourse.”

Try just visiting specific Reddit communities, rather than looking askew at the entire menagerie as if there was value there.

Same goes for YouTube: just subscribe to specific channels based on out-of-band recommendations. Or for Twitter, or Netflix, or anything else. These platforms have good things; even curated collections of good things. But you won’t find them by asking the platform to show you something good.

In short: ignore recommendation systems. They are very good at surfacing content that the average “profitable” user that the business targets, wants to see. They are horrible at surfacing the “best” (e.g. highest positive impact on your life for having consumed it) content.