Reddit essentially gets users addicted, then surrounds them with what appears to be an environment driven by a kind of democratic consensus (everyone can vote!) but which is actually very tightly curated and edited toward political and social ends. This is
so sinister.
You don't get that valuable being a popular platform for link-sharing and comments. You get that valuable by wielding an appreciable amount of power over a large group of people, which Reddit unquestionably does, and then making that power known to other powerful people who have available capital. If you can't continue real growth, gather power instead, and the growth will be artificially infused into your organization instead (like YouTube).
The things Reddit's home office decides to promote to the top of the front page versus what gets insta-buried starts to make a difference in how people think. That's the true malignancy of social media: it warps minds with fictitious, intentionally curated peer pressure.
Addiction-first UX design plus frequent "thinking past the sale" on important issues (Reddit posts usually treat only one side of an issue as though it's the obvious foregone conclusion and work from there), and add a few artificially promoted user comments below, and now you have a company that is able to leverage something akin to peer pressure toward its own private ends. "Not only are you supposed to like X and Y in polite society, but all of your friends already think that. Don't you?" Facebook has been doing that for years with the fake "your friends liked the pages of Walmart and Pepsi" messages.
There needs to be an easier way to talk about how some companies wield entire generations full of hormonal young people and that they can, will, and DO use them to create social upheaval at will.
Edit: typos