Yeah, it's more insidious than that. I've been a heavy Reddit user for 7 years. The situation on most subreddits is now basically all comments being moderator-approved at a fine level of detail. They just do it after the comments appear, giving the impression that free discussion is still happening. Which comments and threads are allowed to persist is becoming very obviously narrower over time, all over the site. There is daily consternation among users over it.