99% of the content is made by 1% of the users, so I don't think this logic applies. Most reddit users do not participate in discussions, they only consume content.
Maybe if people who post any kind of self-promotion for content they create weren’t so aggressively punished on Reddit so often, maybe it’d get more people sharing on it.
As an example, I was once shadowbanned on the entire Reddit site by an admin for posting two links in gaming subreddits to show off a game I had spent almost six months developing full-time as part of a small team. I didn’t submit too many other links because Reddit was my main source of discovering content, but I commented a ton on the site, easily had hundreds of comments.
I was proud of what I had accomplished and I wanted to share with what I thought was my community at the time. I didn’t even realize I was shadowbanned and was commenting for months after until a moderator informed me and said they were manually approving my comments on a particular subreddit.
I tried their appeals “process” and never got a response, which is apparently is how 99% of appeals works on that site.
Harsh lesson I learned there. I never submitted any link for anything there ever again and didn’t read or comment again for a couple of years afterwards, in which I created a new account to do so.
I got into board games in a big way and started reading /r/boardgames, and that lured me back eventually, although since then I discovered all the people who work in the industry are using Facebook groups so that's where I talk board games now. It's also nice to see actual names associated with their comments when it's a bunch of people you know, instead of just usernames you have to mentally translate.
Apparently my shadowbanned account was unblocked eventually and I can post normally from it again, but I know it was banned for at least 4 years, because I checked periodically (If you're not logged in, the user page looks blank. I thought it was some weird glitch but no, it's because I was shadowbanned).
I've been mostly posting in /r/coronavirus lately since I don't want to get into fights with friends on Facebook about my thoughts on it.
