From what I recall of the T_D debacle, it initially started because the sub was so popular that posts from it were flooding r/all and people were bitching about “Trump spam”, so Reddit adjusted the algorithms to bury some of their posts and did that thing where they skirt around saying exactly why, even though everyone knew. And that kind of set off an arms race where T_D posters would try to get posts to the front page, despite Reddit’s efforts to hide them. I can’t exactly remember what went on with the sticky posts, either, but I know at one point T_D started rotating which posts were stickies on a regular basis.
But of course, two years ago when somebody spammed net neutrality activism posts to a huge amount of subreddits (even obscure, low-population ones) and they all got suspiciously high upvote counts to the point where they ranked among the top posts of all time in certain subs, nobody seemed to care.
Just a few months ago, I saw somebody comment “If Reddit was reality, the US would be going into our second term of Bernie Sanders after eight years of Ron Paul.”
