Why should someone an early adopter or whale who most likely invested in this platform early and assumed the most risk be punished? I can understand some new users frustration but the platform has three ways to reward you.

One concern I do have is what happened to Digg.com. Digg was the premier link aggregator before Reddit took over. Power users were able to manipulate the system so that only content they approved of reached the front page. It got so bad before the end, companies were paying these powerful users to promote their products. It ended badly. The userbase jumped ship and Digg dies almost overnight.

Reddit is also having these kinds of problems now but they are a bit different. Brigading is an issue but even more concerning is that company admins are actively censoring content that they don't like. They even went so far as to mess with the site algorithm to keep political or social content out of r/all that they find distasteful.