There's been a steady increase in astroturfing and blogspam over the years on reddit to subs like /r/frugalmalefashion where small indie shops are able to pump and dumb objectively low quality wares. The mod team does the best they can but they can only do so much as the effort to surface good content costs way more then the effort to artificially boost bad content.

In a few years Reddit will be just like the generic google searches for everything but the most heroicly moderated or obscurely small subreddits.