Comment by pbhjpbhj

Historically, before they banned a lot of subreddits. Arguably, to become more attractive to advertisers. I think that was when Voat was set up, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voat (c.2015).

There was a lot of unsavoury content (probably a lot of illegal content), Reddit was more like a -chan site to my recollection. Then it was cleaned up somewhat for the sell off to Conde Nast.

So Reddit (past tense) set themselves up as place for any user content (?), but have moved away from that progressively over the last, what, 15 years.

Maybe it wasn't a conscious thing, maybe it was a startup thing ... Alex O' might yet correct me.