Also important to understanding this: To the users I'm talking about, the "cognitive value" of Reddit is not entirely about directly being fed opinions to take

Also important to understanding this: To the users I'm talking about, the "cognitive value" of Reddit is not entirely about directly being fed opinions to take up as one's own. Many of these users find great value to being exposed to, they deliberately seek out for their own enrichment: idiocy, malice, counterfactuals, cognitive dissonance, debate (honest and otherwise), the whole range of perceptions and opinions. To them, being exposed to these things is just as much of the value of Reddit as the "good stuff". And that seems to be the aspect of Reddit most strongly and immediately under threat. Anyone who does not value this kind of experience (which seems to be a very large proportion of the people participating in this conversation at the most visible levels) is going to see any attempt to frame this type of content as valuable in any way as totally incomprehensible, evil, and malicious itself. So this part of things is pretty close to an impossible conversation to have in public.