[nilkn]

I would argue this is precisely the impression they’re trying to manufacture. There’s a vast and stark difference between the Reddit of today and the Reddit of 2016. The viewpoints of tens or hundreds of millions of people have been systematically removed from the site in the last 4 or so years in one of the most aggressive and vast campaigns of censorship and manipulation I’ve ever personally seen on the internet.

[creato]

Maybe the reddit of 2016 was more manipulated? How would you tell the difference between new manipulation and change of manipulation?

[nilkn]

That's really simple in this case. The space of expressible opinions has been strictly contracted. If it had shifted in some other more complex way then I think you could have a point. In this case though the contraction was very clear, rapid, and enforced through a variety of visible and prominent site-level changes (e.g., introducing extreme quarantines or bans of many subreddits or re-engineering the frontpage to hide content [like introducing r/popular, which selectively only shows certain political content]).