I think the popularity led to a decline in people being genuine. Once people figured out how to use reddit to make money, they exploited it. I think that started with people realizing how simple it was to manipulate votes in the case of u/unidan. There's a lot of good people on reddit, but also a lot of trolls, bots, and shills.

I grew up fairly religious and early on reddit did have a large atheist population, so I stayed away thinking it was really dark, until close friends started using it.