This is an effect more people should experience. Everyone should study and work in their area of specialty until they are considered professionally competent in that subject, then go check out that subject's subreddit. Feel bleak and abject despair. Realize you should never use reddit / similar voting-based internet forums to learn about subjects you don't understand because the signal-to-noise ratio is miserable. It's all people who don't know yet they don't let that fact stop them from posting. Early generations of charlatans "educate" successive generations and so you have this illusion that people might know what they're talking about or at least it appears like there's some legit group consensus. But it's just people going around replying in every sub-thread parroting what some random shmoe posted elsewhere in the very same thread; people racing to parrot it before other people parrot it so they get to be top parrot. People vote for stuff that's familiar to them because we universally are attracted to things we already recognize, so what we get is a bunch of those special sort of misconceptions that are popular among novices churning around endlessly.

I'm beginning to think that user-curated content is fundamentally flawed.