They're just spinning. Anyone who knows their shit can easily fool the system well enough to get past such things but it's a pointless waste of time as they'll just spam report and ban you anyway if they don't like what you are saying. The biggest change reddit made was that you can derail threads by blocking people and prevent them from replying to anyone in a comment chain below you even if they are replying to someone else. You'll notice recently far less back and forth or discussion on many threads.

I think Reddit is largely sanitizing and trying to make it corporately approved and friendly. This will ultimately mean that any kind of free discussion will be eliminated. Companies are going to try to control their own special interest subreddits, say a movie studio controls /r/marvel and will simply use it as advertising and hype vehicle. Or perhaps they will engage in competition by starting a /r/marvelsucks to push DC shit instead. Dunno. Don't care. No point in reading endless pages of "omg I'm so hyped." Over and over again peppered with the occasional real person writing "I think this movie sucked" before 5 billion people chime in to tell them why their opinion is wrong and you totally should go out and see the best movie ever conveniently out in theaters now!