Reddit has a very severe libertarian, anti-woman, anti-black culture. Overall, reddit doesn't mind gay people. Of course, any individual reddit user might not fit that at all, but the defaults are absolutely littered with overt bigotry directed at a variety of groups, although the one that is conspicuously missing is bigotry directed at gays. Which makes sense, since younger people generally don't view homosexuality the way people over 30 do (the line might be 40, but old vs. young being the key thing.) At any rate, that much bigotry bubbling up to the top of reddit isn't an accident; it is upvoted heavily by a very large swath of reddit users.
Yeah, when it first started to show up I wondered if I had just never noticed it, but now the whole site is liable to have a racist/misogynistic circlejerk completely out of the blue. Seems like over the last 2 years there has been a strong sea change and the site is pretty much unusable at this point.
But are those just loud voices, or are they actually the majority? I mean, if we're talking about reddit as a site we ought to be talking about the users themselves not the impression we get of their amalgamation. We already know that the vast majority of reddit users don't vote or comment, even those that do comment aren't going to participate in most threads. FPH managed to completely dominate the front page with just a few thousand people, relatively little compared to the overall numbers on reddit. Given that, I don't see how we can think we can gauge reddit users' political compasses simply based on what the front page looks like.