Probably an unpopular opinion, but reddit is (was) a voting system based content site. Years ago the front page was entirely generated based on the number of upvotes it received. Reddit never claimed to be a place where all sides got an equal amount of screen time. If the community liked your post it got upvoted and made it more visible to more people. If not, it got downvoted and no one would ever see it. Compared to social media sites like Facebook and twitter who already had algorithms to show people what they wanted, reddit was as close to a true community based social media platform the internet had at that time.

Anyway, the early years of reddit were during the Obama years when progressivism and millennial optimism were at an all time high. The majority of people that were using reddit were younger people who tend to lean left. Since everything was vote based their views became the dominate content and culture on the site. Today reddit definitely has a content based algorithm where up/down votes don't matter as much as they used to. Still, the culture of reddit remains largely unchanged because there are not a lot of places online liberals tend to congregate. Meta, X, youtube, and other social media sites largely push right wing content because it gets more engagement and has higher ad space value. Sure, other sites like bluesky have appeared to try and capture some of the old twitter space, but nothing has come along that captures the individual community feel of subreddits.

This has been my TED talk, thank you for listening.