[Jillboy]

I agree with all your points, except for one thing that made me curious:

Why would say Reddit is an untrustworthy site, with a system that rewards untrustworthy users? I'm not a particularly active Reddit user, in fact it's been a while since I've even visited the site so I'm not taking this personally at all, but I'm genuinely interested as to why anyone would consider it an untrustworthy site that encourages untrustworthy users.

[mi100hael]

There have been a lot of shenanigans from the admins/mods over the past year or so, mostly related to the popularity of the pro-Trump subreddit and their resulting chagrin. There have been several thinly-veiled rule changes and algorithm changes aimed at reducing the number of pro-Trump postings that appear on the main homepage and generally lowering the visibility of that subreddit. At one point, the CEO manually edited some comments in the database that were critical of him. It all comes across as somewhat shady and untrustworthy. They could just come out and ban or quarantine the subreddit, but instead they've chose to subversively go Digg-mode and essentially start curating what users see rather than allowing it to rise/fall organically.

[kbenson]

> There have been several thinly-veiled rule changes and algorithm changes aimed at reducing the number of pro-Trump postings that appear on the main homepage and generally lowering the visibility of that subreddit.

It's worth noting that there's nothing inherently bad about this. Possible valid reasons why this step might be taken include gaming of the algorithm by specific groups, or to even out the distribution of front page items is one of the goals for the algorithm is to have a heterogeneous set of items for the front page. Not that I have any specific information in this case to point one way or the other. I just think it's important to not immediately jump to negative conclusions about that, even if a group that experiences some loss of exposure feels negatively affected.

> At one point, the CEO manually edited some comments in the database that were critical of him.

That part is pretty egregious, and while I understand the impulse to do what he did if we take his explanation at face value (I don'[t see a particular reason why not to, it's not flattering), one would hope someone as high up in the organization would understand that playing with the trust of your userbase that way (especially with the group in question) is not likely to end well.

> They could just come out and ban or quarantine the subreddit, but instead they've chose to subversively go Digg-mode and essentially start curating what users see rather than allowing it to rise/fall organically.

I'm not specifically aware of what steps they are taking now. Do you have references to point me towards so I can catch up?

[KirinDave]

Many pro-Trump comments get swept out in botnet purges, because the pro-Trump segment has some actors who are very busy amplifying their voice via sockpuppet accounts to quiet any dissent or discussion on that subreddit.

Try this: post a positive comment about a policy change there. They also talk openly about using multiple identities to control what is allowed to the top. If you watch the "new" section you can see negative or even just not-content-free stories get added often.

There are folks on various forums and IRC channels who will sell you good placement of a story on reddit for a reasonable sum of bitcoin now. It'd be interesting to enlist them to start getting policy questions onto the top of that subreddit.

[gitonup]

Spez (The CEO and one of the admins) has admitted to shadow-editing comments posted by other users without visible tracking (normally edits get a *, and I'm otherwise not aware of any mod- or user-facing ability to do so for comments that are not yours) on /r/The_Donald[1].

[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/spezgiving-how-re...

[KirinDave]

Sure. Quite frankly, I hate those people too. But Reddit's poor decision making goes deeper than that. They have a culture of finding blame rather than solving problems, a massive botnet problem they refuse to address despite multiple people submitting pretty compelling evidence, incredibly lax rule enforcement.

Their voting system encourages people to build elaborate bot networks to game the system. They know it, they refuse to do anything about it.

Reddit is a untrustworthy site that grew and untrustworthy community.