Some of the country subreddits I know, /r/France or /r/Belgium, or misc. interests like /r/gardening /r/dwarffortress are definitely not "gamed by marketers". For those that are about topics that are more easy prey to advertising, competent moderation usually works fine.
It's really not that difficult to find interesting and genuine subreddits.
You’re absolutely right. For anyone who wants to test this, try searching for “State Farm” in Reddit and you’ll see the results almost never have anything to do with whether Statefarm actually pays claims, is fair priced, or a good value to the customer. The posts are all from their internal marketing department doing shit like posting a false AMA request for Jake from State Farm as some kind of low-quality joke to shy away from the points that actually matter.
Not really. The small city-based subs are alright and the hobby based subs are pretty good, bots don't really waste their time in the 'long tail' as of yet, but that will be changing in the next 5 years.
Why do you think the reddit hive mind in small hobby subreddits conglomerates on a few devices / items?
Reddit is literally the most shilled platform. Easy botting + the up vote down vote system