A good Reddit submission can bring in close to 30K new visitors, in my experience.
The user comments were mostly positive (1300 upvotes, 400 downvotes), and the site made a reasonable amount of money from the traffic, but the service was not compelling enough for people to use it daily. That's my fault, though, not Reddit's.
Seriously, if you want to make a good reddit submission, take an inflammatory/biased/extreme opinion pieces or research and quote the most provocative part of it as the title of your submission. Almost a whole paragraph.