What I'm getting at is someone's reputation on a subject is not obvious in Reddit-style forums, so while this does allow the promotion of comments by outsider s

What I'm getting at is someone's reputation on a subject is not obvious in Reddit-style forums, so while this does allow the promotion of comments by outsider savants, the vast majority of non-expert comments end up being from people who are good at being pedantic and exaggerating their understanding. So you do get some outsider savants, and that's cool, but you also get endless waves of BS, superficial observations and contradiction for the sake of contradiction, while opinions from experts that are difficult to understand or digest get ignored (usually downvoted, unless they explicitly credential-drop).