I've never been on Reddit because when I had some time to consume there used to be a great french-speaking site doing the job and filling my needs (called kopikol for whoever cares). Then I pretty much lost time for that active passiveness. I was made aware of Hacker News (HN) in 2011 by someone who knew I was into web creation ; and from there I once discovered Hubski, which happened to be much broader than HN and at the same time very quiet comment-wise (any reddit is filled with 500 comments and dare I say, I've felt like Hubski is on a trench since that day redditors came en masse and for that reason am participating way less). AMA
If you follow the right people you can pretty much avoid all of the reddit talk. I would suggest "ignoring" the #reddit tag as a start. That said, there have been some really great new people on Hubski that came over recently. It's not all bad IMO.