> He suggested that Reddit users are more skeptical and discerning than other people online, making it difficult for conspiracy theories to gain traction on the platform.

Yeah, /r/The_Donald, /r/conservative, /r/politics, etc. beg to differ. Reddit's community is mostly young and largely clueless. Any sub-reddit that maintains any level of quality at all does it through insane amounts of moderation, like /r/askscience or /r/history that will straight-up delete any comment that doesn't cite a legit source.

That said, reddit has been taking steps to crack down on bots and toxic communities: shadow-banning users suspected of being bots, quarantining subreddits, etc., so they deserve some credit for that. It certainly hasn't made it impossible to astro-turf a campaign but has probably made it at least somewhat more difficult.

Could it be it just isn't "cool" for those types of internet communities anymore? I mean even on 4chan which is considered its birthplace it's now mostly talked about in the negative[1]

[1]https://desuarchive.org/_/search/text/qanon/

For those of you who don't understand how the media works stories like this are not organic.

They are initiated and controlled by the subject of the story (in this case Reddit). See also the article about how hard the HN admin's job is.

Atlantic gets clicks, Reddit gets to pat itself on the back for not solving a problem that never existed, and everyone gets publicity.

That's how it's worked for a century if not more.