Reddit died with Aaron Schwartz. It's only gotten worse since then. Today I'd like to take you through the steps how Reddit was destroyed and how sites like Steemit can change the world:

The first thing they did was take away r/reddit.com

This took away a powerful tool for talking about reddit to reddit. The same as how we have steemit for discussing Steemit if you have any concerns, advice or a message for steemit as a whole. It's important we keep that space for input.

The power now resided in individual subreddits, obviously the most popular ones. There was a power grab to become moderators of these subreddits.

It's easy to see the results of these power grabs, from subreddits becoming obsessed with bashing Ron Paul or Bernie Sanders while Hillary Clinton's campaign spent $1 million to post on reddit due to these moderators actions Reddit became a place of censorship, propaganda and outright lies.

a place that doesn't care about truth over pushing convinient narratives.

While Steemit is unmoderated that doesn't make it immune to power grabs. There will always be opportunists. Maybe new whales with an ideological bent or marketers that would have the deep pockets to create their own whales to promote their message and we will have to stay vigilant against them. As a community we have to be more concerned about factual empirical truths more than political narratives.

Once the default subreddits were controlled, drastic changes began to occur.

I remember when r/IAma was open to anyone and the popularity was decided by voting. Now it is nothing more than a cheap place for celebrities to whore out their products and you need to be "approved". Someone named Victoria is involved and how does that makes any sense whatsoever? Celebrities have entire teams of branding/PR/social media teams that work for them. Why do they need to be at reddit HQ and/or required to have a reddit rep? Because these AMA's are extremely organized and sponsored with money.

The subreddits became controlled here is a post about words banned from r/technology

We have to be on the lookout for these kinds of changes and anyone that would attempt to control this site and the democracy inherent to it. Anyone that wants to limit speech, expression, ban people for "wrongthink" while pushing their agenda.

The appearance of shills soon became VERY apparent.

All of a sudden new accounts started popping up out of nowhere. Cue the birth of r/HailCorporate. "Feel good" military posts started appearing, like a soldier coming home to his dog. New users entered AMA's to lob softball questions "Mr Burns, your campaign has the momentum of a runaway freight train, how does it feel to be so popular?" From brand new accounts that never posted again.

Eglin Air Force Base = Reddit's most addicted city! I would hate to be the poor reddit intern who got fired that day! "Didn't you read the memo Billy. US military bases are never to be included in our yearly stats!!!"

Anyone who tries to convince you that shills don't exist is either grossly uninformed or a liar. Protip: the big political subreddits can’t seem to keep the seal on the circlejerk during weekends, almost as if an entire team of manipulators is suddenly on weekend hours.

We should never put ourselves in the position where one group can dictate this entire sites direction.

Now we have blatant censorship on r/news, r/worldnews etc... saying that X site is not allowed.

What ever happened to letting people vote on the content of this website? Trash tabloids constantly go viral on political subreddits due to sensationalized headlines and the fact that most Americans are unaware of different overseas publications.

Not to mention the fact that default subreddit rules are now completely refined, sophisticated and purposely worded to allow maximum mod-interpretation. Honestly, someone with a law degree with a proud.

Major politically-charged subreddits now insist on exact titles or quotes because that stops users from being able to post the important point summary of the article as the title . Using only official titles from only approved media has turned reddit into mainstream media.

Censorship should be avoided at all costs.

Speaking of voting, they changed that too.

We now have an entirely new way to view upvote/downvote scores. A user used to be able to see their score. But now, everything is fuzzed. For example, if you made a semi-controversial comment before, but many people agreed, you may have a score like (47/45), leaving you with a -2 next to the comment. Now you just get a -2 and nobody knows if anyone agreed with you. Reddit worked hard and FOUGHT to leave users with less data than they had before.

Transparency in voting and pretty much everything is what the freedom of this site is going to sink or swim on.

Reddit is not a meritocracy.

tl;dr: Your votes do not matter. The front page is not decided on merit. Different subs are given different algorithms. There is a behind the scene ranking system that gives certain content a "head-start". Steemit should never implement something like this, have the content that makes it to the top actually be the content users voted for. It's what they like, trust your users.

You are posting too much, please wait...

It now doesn't matter if you have confirmed your email, or been posting on this site for years. If you anger the wrong mod/admin or your posts aren't doing "well", then you get benched.

Or you can always just have your comments deleted. You will not even know your comment is deleted. You will still see it. Only you. The only way to know is to be inherently suspicious, and sign out of your account after clicking on the permalink of the comment.

A sneaky tactic, but hey, at least it is only your comment and not your whole account. Isn’t it great that we have shadow-banning on a website that claims to support free speech?

Get the idea, Reddit has become a completely one-sided mess that pretends to be democratic but is quickly becoming the Fox News of the internet. For this site to become better than reddit and not just a clone it has to be a democracy. People vote and things swing from side to side, everybody learns in the end.