Was Reddit ever not a series of echo chambers?

I didn't use Reddit back in the early days of the internet, but I think it's probably one of my least favorite websites now and I recently added it to the bin of websites I'll try to never frequent along with various mainstream social media platforms. From a cursory glance, most of the popular subreddits seem to suffer from a quality perspective because the users seem to succumb to groupthink, enjoy censorship of alternate perspectives to whatever the consensus of the subreddit is, lack the use of critical thinking when putting forward responses and instead opting for recycled jokes, and easily succumb to emotional and infantile responses when confronted with even slight deviations out of the norm.

Some of these traits I do observe here and elsewhere on the internet, and it makes me wonder to what extent this is a symptom of the internet at large; but I think Reddit amplifies this tendency and makes it worse than alternatives through policies such as:

(1) The upvote/downvote system hiding posts that are sufficiently downvoted essentially promoting censorship via the userbase

(2) An unpaid moderation staff that seem generally quick on the trigger to delete posts and ban users for failing to conform.

I could go on, but I'll leave at it this. Reddit seemed to be a great place on its surface to go get specific information and have a dialogue about niche subjects. However, it is mostly a terrible place to have dialogue. I suspect the Reddit model is to blame for amplifying groupthink, but I'm curious if this model ever actually worked. For people who frequented Reddit in its early days, was it always like this or is this a newer phenomena?