the whole point of joining a “sub” is so that the community can gather relevant information on that topic and post it there. then the community also judges that content with the voting system. the goal being that everyone creates various information pipelines relevant to themselves that they then share with the community to form an additional pipeline. it’s not like i don’t go to direct news sources, but typically i would hear about virtually every topic they cover 12+ hours before on reddit. i typically get more in depth information about the topic, but reddit makes me aware of it nearly instantly.
It became a problem because it meant they were forced to bow down to advertisers instead of leaning into user funding. Discord has leaned into user funding very heavily, but I don’t know of any other social media that is more funded by its users than it is by ads and is regularly used/promoted, at least in the US.