There is not a think, it is an overall weariness of issues. Reddit founders admitted to creating their content originally when starting up the site. While not a massive manipulation, they pretended to be original posters (with separate user names) when it was not.

The key points here are to take everything with a grain of salt. There are known organizations developing user names on all sorts of forums and social media sites and selling their utilization to people.

I've seen on numerous occasions, an anti-conservative post miraculously parked on the front page above other posts that have twice the upvotes, twice the comments and submitted more recently. If that isn't direct manipulation, then their algo for front page content is completely backwards.