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I don't know if the above commenter is talking about the same time period. However, the period around 2016 when Trump got elected revealed some odd decisions that Reddit had that it eventually needed to change. It's been a while, but this is what I remember: How Reddit works is you have various subreddits about different topics. You can go to each subreddit individually to view the highest rated posts about that specific topic. However, most people don't do this, but rather go to reddit.com and see a feed of various subreddits combined. For active users this feed will be tailored to their choices, however, what to show users that are new or not logged in is a question that Reddit struggled with. For a while, this was done by having some subreddits be chosen to be shown by default. Initially there were only a few, I think around 10-20, and they were handpicked. At some point more subreddits became default, I think it grew to 50-100 if I remember. However, this caused a lopsidedness where these few handpicked default subreddits had orders of magnitude more views than non-default ones, so Reddit was split into two worlds between popular default subreddits and niche unknown ones. Imagine a website where half of it was like Twitter and Facebook and half of it was like Hacker News. To fix this, at some point they changed it to ALL subreddits being default. In other words, the most popular posts sitewide would reach the default feed, no matter which subreddit they were from. There was a NSFW filter, but other than that there were no controls at all. The people in change of Reddit at this time were very anti-censorship, to where they felt that there should be no moderation other than voting. Around this time Trump was elected and a certain subreddit that could charitably be described as frenzied for Trump started growing in popularity. As a result, a lot of their posts reached the front page of Reddit, and their posts were not just biased but cult like or even containing outright fake news. Reddit eventually solved this with a feed called popular that was a middle ground, where instead of having a handful of default subreddits, it would be all subreddits minus those with extreme topics. Critics viewed it as censoring, and it was, but it stopped Reddit from sliding towards a 4chan like reputation, and I am confident the Reddit of today would have never been able to be mainstream without this type of change. |