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Once a site gets too popular it gets normified and it just becomes nothing but reposts, in-jokes and low effort crap.
Reddit’s appeal was never in the popular subs, but in the long tail. Forget about the dozen subreddits with million+ subscribers, what made it interesting is the thousands of subs with a few hundred active users.
You also have to realize that Reddit would squash popular communities that weren’t as advertiser friendly. Which led to the larger (bad) communities.