I have a uniquely long perspective of Reddit, which I'll share.

As one of those who migrated to Reddit from Digg during the great Digg migration specifically, circa around 2012/2013, I'd do think that was when they grew from a tiny forum, even smaller than Saidit is now, but very similar, to the quickly growing artificial reality of a control and brainwashing cage it is now (in line with most of current society's media and every access to communication and information).

Reddit essentially began during this Digg exodus. During that time, r/Conspiracy was the main news subreddit. I created one of the first couple state focused subreddits, a form of r/Illinois before r/Illinois or other state subs existed. I created this and abandoned it shortly after, based primary on my history with Yahoo Chat, which had regional char rooms such as Illinois:1 ....2, 3, 4. This quickly exploded to a large and successful regional subreddit for each state...which was eventually corrupted into just like the rest of Reddit. These local regional forums grew to have large user bases with high interaction rates, that became ultra valuable demographics for targeted political and social manipulation campaigns.

As one of the people who watched it's rise, then fall, Reddit's end really came to fruition in 2016. I'd argue that Reddit downward spiral of death clearly and undeniably started in 2015, precisely when they partnered with CTR Correct The Record, the Hillary Campaign focused social media manipulation juggernaut spending hundreds of millions on coordinated troll farms of sock puppet counts and coordinated groups taking control of public internet forums. While court proceeding later confirmed this, it didn't mention Reddit, as it was a smaller player at the time and they had invested much more in manipulating other larger platforms, which were detailed in the court proceedings.

The transformation of Reddit was extreme. They gutted all the moderators of large subreddits and replaced them with different moderators all at once. Some moderators were kept, but they were either expressly injected with higher ranking moderators or a mass of brand new moderators who would coordinate to ensure legacy moderators were forced into a lame-duck position and greifed until banned or abandoning their position and thus control.

This came with a wave of attack groups, who exploited Reddit's major vulnerabilities to control and exploit it. The most widely used exploit was the extreme vulnerabilities in the platform's design and governance, which made a few common run-of-the-mill forum attack techniques god-like OP. These were common techniques, even upset people seemed to naturally devolve to doing without consciously realizing it. They were used in a widespread manor, by individuals, small groups, and many to manipulate Reddit.Yet when millions of dollars in coordinated efforts made professional abuse of them, Reddit was brought to it's knees and never was the same.

Most of these techniques are at some level a direct or indirect abuse of the The Pyramid of Debate, who's endeared support is largely my attraction to Saidit, despite having Reddit's fundamental platform structure, while largely having more faith in emerging decentralized platforms I just haven't been able to stick with.

I could list a couple of these specific techniques I feel exploited Reddit thoroughly, but they are difficult and time consuming to properly describe or give examples. Many of them are very generic, common, and likely just forms of ones used to subvert and control all of society at their root. So before I try to describe the most impactful of those, but it will be disappointingly brief.

I have very fond memories of the good old days of Reddit (pre-mid-2015). After being permanently banned from most subreddits I had spent a decade contributing to during Reddit's Trump political and Covid censorship and public manipulation campaign, then having my account mysteriously suspended and its every comment and post apparently manually combed through by Reddit admin (not mods), selectively removing content for what can only be petty political motivations I was pretty upset. Yet, honestly, albeit not usually that extreme, I was used to this sort of abuse from Reddit. Like a battered woman, who keeps going back, I was callous to it. Yet, this time was extreme and must different. They went way too far and banned my account's 'self' feed, banning my posts to myself and in one swath with no reason, banned all the community subreddits I had made. They refused to explain, review, or respond in any ways through their multiple, completely useless grievance systems. They are all just for looks and not existent, with the policy of simply never respond. These were non-controversial subreddits, with non-controversial content, which I had spent a lot of effort for months and months to build, nurture, and attempt to attract users forming communities; all erased in a blink without a word.

After the Twitter Files, it seems most likely to have been just more of the US state sponsored subversion of the public of the time, through "public private partnerships," which equated to the US government blackmailing companies with threats of destruction through regulatory action and their influence to publicly destroy with negative publicity campaigns. An extreme all-of-government effort, with intimidation and abuse of authority, built an army of forced-conscript private corporation, who controlled all of the nation's communication, news, and information flows. They used this army to manipulate the election and push the public to take mysterious injections, which we still don't know what they were; just that we were heavily lied to and many, like myself, were largely crippled since the day it was taken. I am still left to wonder each day if I will make it to the next year. Mine is a series of mystery problems gradually ramping to emergency from the day I took my first Moderna shot, which many $10k's on top of high tier medical insurances, couldn't determine, aside from newly identifying a immune disease an assurance that this doesn't explain the confirmed problems. I simply enriched surgeons through expensive tests, with nothing to show for it.