This is exactly why people started appending "site:www.reddit.com" to their searches. It was much easier (but not guaranteed) to find organic discussion and reviews of products.
Of course, nothing gold can stay, and this tarnish appeared by way of pigfucker Spez making Reddit worse by allowing corporations to flood the site with bots in the name of boosting MAUs for the IPO. That said, I can appreciate the position Google is in- how do you get to be a search engine of such size that your users can trust your results you deliver to them, filter out SEO spam, and have the whole system automated due to costs?
Or rather, I would appreciate that position, if Google were more interested in quality search results than in spam advertising.