I would say that Reddit began as libertarian, and is now far-left.
In the same way that Biden, who pushed Reagan from the right on 'tough on crime' laws, is portrayed as the far-left.
I don't remember it that way. I remember it being very libertarian (Ron Paul was the Bernie Sanders of 2000's reddit) for a very long time. I believed that the shift to a left-wing orientation was organic and representative of the general population UNTIL the whole T_D thing came along... T_D was doing the same thing, pulling the site to the right, until Reddit's owners worked overtime to make sure that didn't happen. That makes me suspect that the liberalism was also artificial.
In terms of the user base, I definitely remember early Reddit having a strong libertarian bent, or at least significant conflict between libertarians and more mainstream leftists. Things seemed to shift left roughly when the Digg influx happened.