This is just adding in more recent content.
> gets a pedantic reply
were you also trained on reddit?
Reddit is ok and quite cool for targeted discussion on targeted sub-reddits. But all the general subreddits visited by general population and everything that pops once in a while on the front page is a target for hive mind.
For HN comparison, there is a lot of "wrong" here too, but here you can find a cited academic study from one good American university that reveals most of the botfarms and fake news disseminators come from western sphere. If you try to claim on Reddit or anywhere on the internet that fake news champion is not Russia+China+whoever is evil, your entry will get buried.
Also, ask yourself who's the median redditor. For my country's national subreddit the median redditor is a high school kid from the capital.
If there is a thing, and topic about it has reached the internet discussions, the participants will have an opinion regardless of their actual practical knowhow about the thing. They'll form their opinion otherways. Platforms like Reddit favour a master opinion due to score and moderation system, so one out of N wrong theories will surface as the master opinion.
In real life, if you ask bunch of random people about the thing they don't know, you get wildly different answers, and largely no-one will back up anyone there. Certainly not in enough force to push a confidently wrong answer up as the "people's opinion"