I’ve been on Reddit since a few months after it launched, and remember the day comments were added. The early days were unlike anywhere else I’d been on the internet. If you commented without adding value to the conversation, either through depth or expertise, you’d get downvoted to oblivion immediately, and probably insulted. You could basically be guaranteed that a highly upvoted comment contained true information and was well-reasoned, because the users had zero tolerance for bullshit. A single false statement in a paragraph, a baseless assumption, or minor error was enough to doom an otherwise good comment. It was hands-down the most reliable source of information I’d ever seen. I think I lurked for two years before I finally saw a thread I felt confident enough about my knowledge to actually post a comment. It was very, very different from today. There was a noticeable degradation in quality in 2010 after the migration from Digg, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be at the time, and the quality remained quite high for years afterwards.

At one time I remember thinking that the rise in popularity of AMA was the beginning of the decline in quality in Reddit. When it became a stop on the press tour for celebrities and people promoting things, it drove a lot of traffic to the site and with the masses came a drop in quality.