A lot of it is also the moderation of certain subreddits though that's not easy to replicate elsewhere. For instance most subreddits dedicated to football (soccer) clubs maintain a tier list of journalists based on their reliability and will only allow reputable sources to be posted on the subreddit.

That's quite frankly a lot of bullshit that I would otherwise have to sort through myself to get the same information on transfer movements and news

Not to mention many of the main subs started banning the very sites that kept traffic going to them in the first place. If you ever wondered why your favorite niche blog about any topic stopped posting, its because mods on reddit started classifying anything not mainstream as blogspam.