It seems like any platform that features link aggregation is soon overrun by bots and self-promoters trying to drive traffic, and pages and pages of link posts versus pages and pages of people talking.
Are there any lemmy instances or other defederated networks that focus on Q&A, niche communities, and people conversing, instead?
I use gnus.el for usenet, which already has those filtering and scoring features. And Usenet has had spam filtering since the 1990s. So I think you are saying the next reddit would just be usenet.