Here's the thing though, a lot of the smaller subreddits are ghost towns. The few with active participation seem to follow the same curve where they ride nice for awhile, then suddenly blow up and and the quality drops overnight (we all saw this with Bestof, which despite numerous rule changes and still being a decent subreddit, is not nearly as good as it was a year ago) or they're mostly discussion based subreddits which lack a lot of outside content so they same old discussions repeat again and again ( photography and photoshop come to mind.) Slightly larger subreddits which get better content and have good conversation all tend to be more fanboy things (r/Apple and r/Android) and tend to be a bit of a circle jerk (which really is fine, they are by definition fan based subreddits so of course fans are going to be fans) there still tends to be a lot of good info and conversation though. My big problem is that there no longer exist places on reddit to have a more general intelligent conversation. Politics, News, Technology, and any other broad based topic is dominated by the same old tired puns, memes, reposts and ideas. Over and over, post after post. I would love a subreddit were news was submitted, and people had an honest conversation and breakdown on it. I don't want to always be browsing highly specific links.
Perhaps, but at least SNL still produces OC. EDIT: I mean that as a joke, Reddit still has a ton of good content, just a lot more shit to shift through in order to find it.
The best subreddits are the ones that cater to niche hobbies and interests. /r/rats, /r/crochet, /r/techsupportgore are the first place ones to come to mind. There is a single topic that can't be that easily deviated from, the communities are small and self-contained, and they don't attract idiot teenage boys.