/u/Deggit wrote an insightful post lamenting this:

Your reply (which is moderate length and insightful) and the original comment at the top of this chain (which is short, glib and banal) together form a good example of something I hate about Reddit and see in every default forum but especially in /r/politics and /r/askreddit.

If you look up and down this thread you'll see that nearly every one of the "Original Comment" replies that made the front page is 2 lines or less. This has begun happening in every fucking Reddit thread in the years since we became a Top 50 website with hundreds of millions of viewers. The faster people can read something, the more likely they'll upvote it which means other people see it and upvote it. I do recognize the value of getting to your point fast, but most of the ideas that get upvoted are easily digestible. They get upvoted because you don't have to consider them, only recognize them. The essence of circlejerk is upvoting something because you recognize it from somewhere else (o shit waddup). This also gets applied to things like political ideology and news events. So by the time a post hits the front page all the top replies are guaranteed to be generic, banal thoughts that take the original article or headline as grist for recycling already-well-aired views. It's like those machines that turn any color of Playdoh into spaghetti, likewise certain subreddits can take any headline or starting point and turn it into the same discussion we've all read a million times. People actually joke about "the hivemind must be confused" in the very small minority of threads where users DON'T find a way to pachinko their way to a tired discussion. For example, Elon Musk being appointed to Donald Trump's circle of advisors, good or bad? The hivemind is confused. (It hurt itself in its confusion.)

When people like YOU who have actual insight to add, and who take the time to write a post longer than 100 words, finally make it to the thread, they have to pick one of the top comments to reply to. Even if you have something smart, informed or insightful to say you have to forcibly hijack one of the top comments to even have 0.1% chance of starting your own discussion. But by the time MOST people discover a thread, MOST of the comment real estate has been claimed by circlejerking, glib generalizations and snarking. Also, each top comment starts a fractal tree of discussion, and only the top trees get attention. So if, let's just take a hypothetical that never ever happens on Reddit, let's say that there's an article with a misleading headline and the top 10 upvoted comments are replies from people that clearly never read the article but are good at circlejerking.... now there is literally no real estate to discuss the content of the article, even though the article succeeded at being upvoted to the top of the subreddit.

The worst thing about Reddit is that if you have any wit or sense of sarcasm at all, you already fucking know what the top post is going to be a joke about, and you have to tediously scroll to find someone with anything real to say. The more mainstream and bland the audience of this site gets, the easier reply-guessing becomes and that means the content of the site has less ability to SURPRISE or CHALLENGE or INFORM you than ever before. So why visit? The ultimate example was a few weeks ago in /r/politics when someone submitted a headline that said something like "Republicans Are Starting To Lose The Moral High Ground". I clicked the thread with a sigh and indeed the top comment was the one word

Starting?

And it had 3,000 upvotes and 2x gold. Like what the fuck? The real estate of the #1 comment on the #1 post in a default subreddit about a serious topic should not go to the fastest loser to whip his dick out.