Damn near every point on there is either misleading or straight up incorrect.
1) The first thing they did was take away r/reddit.com.
Nobody used it for communicating with reddit about reddit, or whatever they claimed. Go on /r/reddit.com and look at the posts, that's not what that sub was at all. It was essentially /r/IDontKnowWhereElseToPutThis. Meanwhile, there's still actual subs run by admins like /r/ideasfortheadmins, plus user created subs to discuss reddit.
2) The power now resided in individual subreddits, obviously the most popular ones. There was a power grab to become moderators of these subreddits.
Now? As opposed to when? AFAIK the moderators of subreddits have always had the ability to control the content of the sub, so long as it stays within reddit's rules.
Also, the claim that /r/circlejerk was controlled by a shadowy anti-Ron Paul cabal is weird. The pro-Ron Paul circlejerk was absolutely massive on most of reddit, and /r/circlejerk mocked that like they do everything else. Was it also controlled by an anti-Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson conspiracy? Because they made fun of them in the exact same way they made fun of Ron Paul.
3) Once the default subreddits were controlled, drastic changes began to occur.
The moderators have always had the power to decide what content is allowed in a subreddit, and everyone has been free to make alternate subreddits if they disagree with the content. It doesn't happen too often, but it certainly does on occasion. Off the top of my head, it definitely happened with the XKCD subreddit that was run by Holocaust deniers, so people made a new subreddit.
As for the /r/IAmA claims, I'm not seeing the issue with separating it into a subreddit for things people actually care about and a subreddit for AMAs with everyone else. /r/casualiama exists for things that aren't extraordinary, and it's not like /r/IAmA only has famous people on it.
If you look through it right now, there's lots of non-famous people on the front page of that subreddit. Just looking at the top posts of the last week, there's been a "poacher hunter", an undercover investigator, a 911 dispatcher, a Ugandan filmmaker, and a couple of bone marrow donors. Do they all fit into "nothing more than a cheap place for celebrities to whore out their products"?
People also clearly enjoy celebrity AMAs. Why shouldn't they exist?
4) The appearance of shills soon became VERY apparent.
"Shill" is the most hilarious insult on the internet. Literally anyone who disagrees with someone else will be called a shill. I've been called a shill dozens of times for tons of different thing. I'm apparently a paid employee of Monsanto, Big Pharma, both Israel and Palestine, the government, climate change...people, feminism (I don't even know who a feminist shill is working for, but okay), political correctness (again, what?), and tons of other shit.
Hell, the people on /r/conspiracy call each other shills all the time, because apparently any conspiracy theorist with a theory that another disagrees with must be a false flag planted shill to make the rest look crazy.
Do shills exist? Sure. But most of accusations of shilling are probably completely off base. Some people just can't handle the fact that others have a different opinion.
As for the air force base, is it really surprising that a place with a demographic heavily skewed towards 18-20something males goes on reddit? Especially one with tons of IT people?
5) Now we have blatant censorship on r/news, r/worldnews etc... saying that X site is not allowed.
I see 0 problem with banning things like clickbait and sites that post blatantly false information. If someone wants a subreddit that posts tons of bullshit, they can just as easily subscribe to a subreddit like that (/r/conspiracy loves to do it, for that matter).
What ever happened to letting people vote on the content of this website?
What's wrong with only letting people use the title of the article? When people could post whatever they wanted, they ended up making tons of bullshit titles that weren't even what the article actually said.
6) Speaking of voting, they changed that too.
How the hell is this being spun into a conspiracy? Maybe it's annoying, but the goal was presumably to stop people from upvoting themselves to look like people agreed.
7) Hey guise, us nerds who run reddit have decided to shuffle all of the front-page subreddits, tee-hee we are so random ‿^
The front page subs have changed like 5 times since I've been on reddit. Why wouldn't they update them as new subreddits are created and as subs wane/wax in popularity (/r/atheism and the rage comics sub used to be on the front page...)?
I don't get how /r/circlejerk not being on the front page is a bad thing. First it was one big conspiracy against Ron Paul, and now a few points down it's a "pesky subreddit" that "hits too close to home"? And 2XC was presumably added to appeal to a wider demographic of potential users, since most people only see the front page when they first start. Women have been historically underrepresented on reddit, so front paging that subreddit might help increase their userbase.
8) You are posting too much, please wait...
Is it surprising that the site tries to prevent spam? AFAIK the amount of time you have to wait between posts is tied to karma, which seems fair, preventing people from making a new account every time they get banned for spam. It's imperfect, but there's not really a better way to do it.
As for the claims that admins impose higher limits to fuck with people, is this actually based on any evidence?
And every time someone complains of being shadow banned it's ridiculously easy to connect them to rule breaking (it's really not that hard to avoid the site rules, there aren't exactly a lot of them).
9) Reddit is not a meritocracy
How the fuck did they come to the conclusion that votes don't matter? A non-simple algorithm, or different ones being used for different subreddits, doesn't mean that votes don't matter. I was always under the impression that the number of subscribers or average number of votes per post in a subreddit had some impact on what page posts landed on, just to prevent the front page from being completely dominated by shit like /r/funny that just gets way more votes than anything else.
I don't see what's wrong with keeping the front page diverse with multiple subs, else you'd never see the shit from the smaller subs without actually visiting them.
As for /r/conspiracy being banned from bestof, the mods have full discretion to do that. Anyone can make a new bestof subreddit (and others already exist anyway) if they don't like these mods.
In any case, it's pretty understandable that someone would want to ban a cesspool like /r/conspiracy from their subreddit. It's pretty much [as racist as it gets](reddit.com/r/isrconspiracyracist).
10) The arrival and subsequent take over of r/undelete.
I know nothing about this conspiracy, so maybe it's entirely true. In any case, nearly everything I've seen on /r/undelete was deleted for breaking subreddit rules, and people got angry that those rules exist in the first place.
11) Now we are seeing a new site-wide trend that is designed to make it even harder to call out shills
Two subs (/r/politics and /r/canada) make up a sitewide trend? And the rule is basically "don't be a dick and publicly call people a shill for disagreeing, send a PM with details if you have evidence for it.
Like I said before, calling people a shill is often hilariously stupid in the first place. Tons of subreddits, even /r/conspiracy, which OP loves so much, have similar rules in place. From the conspiracy sidebar:
Posts that attack this sub, users or mods thereof, will be removed. Accusing another user of being a troll or shill can be viewed as an attack, depending on context. Repeat offenders are subject to a ban.
12) All of the proper "checks and balances" are now in place.
I'm not even sure what this is supposed to mean, but okay.
I love the Boston Bombing conspiracy nonsense, though.
Why should a community be demonized for aggregating information and doing something that has proven to be successful in 90% of cases, particularly disasters?
When the hell was reddit detective work proven to be successful, especially 90% of the time? What? And the bullshit detective work is probably demonized because they decided, with no actual evidence, that someone completely innocent was guilty of a terrorist plot. How is that okay to this person?
I was on reddit in the exact moment the shift happened and NOBODY could tell me why they suddenly believed, without any other evidence , that two people attending the marathon with a circle around them was evidence of guilt.
Then a single paragraph later they accuse the government of manipulating reddit opinions of the false accusation with exactly 0 evidence. In fact, nearly every point they've made has no evidence, yet they were somehow confused when other people reached a conclusion with no evidence except the government/police identifying suspects?
13) Online guerrilla tactics.
Did OP ever stop to think that the spam on whoaverse might have been curtailed by, say, a policy like "8) You are posting too much, please wait..."? Or by actual moderation? Absolutely hilarious.
And then they go on to accuse reddit of being behind the spam to "designed to destroy the competition by any means". What was that they said before about believing things with no evidence?
There is a head running things, and it is sinister and they are making A LOT of money, and have A LOT of power, and A LOT of influence.
Where is all that evidence that they thought was important a few paragraphs ago? This is unfounded paranoia in it's purest form.
I can't wait for my accusations of being a reddit shill though, I'll have to reddit to my collection of shadowy cabals that have yet to send my paycheck.