Perhaps equally concerning is how cliquey the moderators of many of the reddits are. This might not be a problem if not for their apparent line of thinking that

Perhaps equally concerning is how cliquey the moderators of many of the reddits are. This might not be a problem if not for their apparent line of thinking that reddit should not be a democracy, but rather a collection of little monarchies where the mods ultimately decide the content. There are certainly still parts of reddit that are "run by the community", but the group of mods with an anti-democratic bent has gained a great amount of influence site-wide. One recent event where a long standing minimally moderated subreddit was overtaken by this group really brought the clique to light. Someone even made a graph or two about it: http://imgur.com/WLG9wxr http://imgur.com/WLG9wxr http://i.imgur.com/HI2jIFq.png http://i.imgur.com/HI2jIFq.png Many of these mods frequent the "meta" subreddits which are often accused of exactly the sort of vote manipulation you are descrbing. The response by these groups is always a cheeky "oh hey, it's not us, we don't encourage that!" Speculation is rampant regarding the truth since people outside of reddit itself have limited abilities to look at the data needed to determine what's going on. Perhaps reddit is going the way of digg with power users running and gaming the site. There are lots of rules about users manipulating voting patterns, but none for moderators. Once in control, they can influence a subreddit however they see fit. The short story is that many users still see reddit as a democracy when it is increasingly not.