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