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I feel like Reddit is mostly dead. Or at least in very heavy decline.
Whenever I look into a particular topic, there's a 80-90% chance the discussion is happening on twitter or discord. The big subreddits look alive but if you look carefully, you'll quickly realize they are incredibly heavily botted.
As far as smart people, there seems to be a very strong correlation between intelligence and intolerance towards censorship. Every worthwhile sub I can think of has moved elsewhere. There's a couple news-related ones I still glance at occasionally because reddit is good as a news aggregator but that's about it.
As far as useful information, you can simply ask an LLM. They've already been trained on everything reddit had to offer, and they can be as kind, patient and detailed as you want them to be. They'll never delete your question because it's a 'duplicate', they can provide sources and you only have to wait <1sec if you have anything urgent. They lie sometimes but so did people on reddit.
Even where not botted, they're... running into problems.
I'm sure some amount of /r/ffxiv is software talking to itself, but a wide variety of information has just moved elsewhere for other reasons -- if you want DPS guides, the Balance is better formatted than anything you can do in reddit; if you want raid strats, either youtube or thepfstrats are the only real options; if you want crafting stuff there's TeamCraft; if you're trying to learn about Baldesion Arsenal or Bozja you're pretty much stuck in Discords. Only some of it's explicitly censored (eg game modding for FFXIV is in a gray area, and corresponding has moved almost entirely to Discord and carrds), but a far greater part just found it better to use the reddit as a recruiting nexus and nothing more.
Similarly, there's a couple central FIRST reddits (/r/ftc and /r/frc), and they sometimes have news or useful questions, especially during their respective seasons proper. But almost every serious discussion happens in Discords or a classical forum (chiefdelphi) or a team-specific website.
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