Moderator curation of individual subreddits is completely different from admin banning of entire subreddits and categories of content. If you don't like the way a particular community is governed, you can start your own. The admins are now removing that fundamental feature of the site for certain entire classes of speech that are considered offensive.

I must say I wasn't there in the beginning of times but I do know Reddit has been censoring more and more these last two years than they did before.

/r/seattle's had an ongoing problem with moderation that can be described most nicely as "inconsistent", and often is mostly conducive to a hostile community environment. It's repeatedly been broached and challenged with varying degrees of diplomacy by members, and always met with total denial that there's any sort of problem. That reddit's policy is to refuse to intervene has created more problems on the website than it has solved.

I would almost prefer the admins take a hard line on abusive content and demand consistent enforcement regarding harassment both on the site and with any promotion of off-site harassment. In a better world, reddit admins would have intervened on /r/seattle's moderation team a long time ago. It's clearly a broken situation.