Just look at how often Bill Gates gets glazing articles posted which receive suspicious rankings. None of the comments mention the Epstein-sized elephants in the room.
Politics is even worse, and it's useless as a platform for taking political temperature. Numerous companies openly admit to this activity and Reddit has never commented on this practice.
No serious person would ever suggest using it to take the "political temperature" of society at large. It's about as useful as Nextdoor for that.
MRAs were a minority of a minority of users; even when the site was mostly white and Asian men talking about computer science, it was overwhelmingly liberal. There are far more who fit into the MRA category now but those have come about due to the cultural trend towards sexual doomerism among Gen Z men, who inherited it from millennial incels (most of whom fled the site around the time of Ellen Pao’s tenure). MRAs were mostly Gen X and elder millennials.
> I assume the actual political makeup of the user base hasn't changed that much in that time
Why? The site used to have a minority of right-leaning users (/r/conservative, /r/anarcho_capitalism, /r/DebateFascism, /r/TheDonald, /r/altright, /r/darkenlightenment, /r/politicalcompassmemes, etc.). All of these communities are completely marginal now; half of them were outright banned from the site. Reddit doesn’t have a positive reputation among people who are even moderately conservative because of how heavy-handed the moderation is. It has always had this reputation, but there was a brief time from around 2014 to around 2017 when conservatives could actually engage with parts of it in a way that they just don’t bother to do anymore.