(ex-reddit employee, employed during the changes) - we'd been designing changes to the algorithm to not be just a few top subreddits, and to instead show more variety well before r/the_donald even started; in fact, it was one of the first things Steve took on when he came back. There's no anti-r/the_donald conspiracy; there's much less discussion about them internally than they'd like to believe.
I believe there were two edits from the time /r/the_donald became popular, the first was a more general edit as you say, but the second if I recall correctly was all about keeping the /r/the_donald from the top. Though it seemed to have backfired because after the second edit I saw more of them on /r/all not less.
The reason pretty much all posts in the_donald are upvoted by users is due to the fact Clintons Correct the record was downvoting the_donald posts in hordes.
Again if Reddit would not have aligned themselves with one candidate named Clinton they probably wouldn't have this problem now.
Except this thread and subsequent news articles being published on this event contradict that statement. If no one cared then why did the ceo care enough to slight of hand users posts?
I'm specifically referring to the algorithm, not Steve's database admin rights. If you're talking about my "there's no big conspiracy" - all I know is that Steve claims to be a lone agent, and I believe him. But, hey, I'm not there, dunno.
