If I have something that I actually want to share with reddit, I submit it three or four times with different titles and URLS so it has a chance of actually rising above the noise. Too often something gets modded to zero points and no one sees it again.
The idea is that reddit was much better in its first year, when the community was smaller. A social news site seeded by Paul Graham and Paul Graham loyalists (like reddit in its first year) should have better than average discussions. If the site accidentally gets too big and the discussion degrades, there's no problem, PG gets to sell the site and the core community moves to a new clone site. Or maybe by then someone will come up with an elegant solution for making the community of a big social news site not suck.