Reddit’s value has never been in the “average redditor” or the “popular subs”. The real value is in the niche tail of communities and the fact that they have such a massive amount of people that even if “only” 10% of their users were decent people, it still meant that they had enough decent people to talk with something to contribute.
Yeah, I don't use Reddit any longer, but it was really great that there were active subs devoted to incredibly obscure topics. If you wanted to talk about something, chances were that thousands of other people did too.