The original reddit was closer to hackernews than the generic site it is now. Not only that but spez has admitted that the original traffic was artificial, by which I mean, the owners themselves were creating fake engagement through various means, such as scraping and cross-posting content from sites like digg via sockpuppets to appear that the site had way more traffic than it had.
Plot twist: reddit is one guy and all his bots.
Interestingly
https://lemmy.ca/comment/5057563