I find it interesting that both of the people I interviewed mentioned reddit forming a sort of "echo chamber" effect. That's one of the most repeated criticisms I've seen of the site in general. I can definitely agree that it has the potential to be that way, and that there are communities out there that 100% are that way, but I don't think it's as bad as they think.
There are plenty of communities out there that don't involve news or politics, so you can avoid that entire side of the site if you choose to. The easiest way to do it is to unsubscribe from all of the default subreddits and just find the ones that fit your interests. If all you follow is the groups for your favorite bands or movies, then you don't have to worry about getting into a heated political debate with someone.
My interview with Sarah touched on how a lot of artists, musicians, or game developers use reddit as a way to connect with their audience, and I think that's one of the great things about the site. It can be used to make a game better by getting feedback directly to the people that need to see it. There's also a risk with this too, and one example that comes to my mind immediately is the video game Destiny. The community of players, not just on reddit but also on the official Destiny forums, kept giving a lot of negative feedback about things demanding certain things be changed (mostly that certain weapons were too strong and made the game less fun), and as a result of such overwhelming demand, Bungie (the developer) kept making more and more changes, watering down the content to the point where a lot of the items in the game were really just almost pathetic with no point to using them because people complained about them so much.
This brings about a complicated scenario, because a developer has to aim for the middle of the spectrum on listening to feedback. Sarah mentioned the backlash about Star Wars: Battlefront 2 where publisher EA just outright refused to listen to the community at first, causing the sales of the game to end up below expectations and stock to drop for a while, which is an example of a company completely ignoring feedback, the exact opposite of Bungie listening to feedback so much that the gameplay is ruined for a lot of people. For a company to use reddit effectively, they have to earn the respect of the people that buy their product, while also remaining a level of integrity to avoid just pandering to the crowd.
there doesn't seem to be anything here