Hi, blog post OP here. While Reddit has its own challenges, it proven quite resilient to this particular form of content quality drop.
We found that this is such a common workflow with our first few users that we've built it in as a default search engine suggestion and also I wrote this extension for it that we use.
Yeah I seen if you post a specific corporation name, your topic will be bombarded by some companies astroturfing.
You bet every fortune 500 company has a reputation management company willing to "guide the conversation" with a few positive comments and a barrage of upvotes/downvoted.
But considering how easy it is to game reddit I'm not so sure I can trust it anymore.
All r/hailcorporate I guess...