Could this hurt Reddit's credibility? Seems like it's kind of a big deal.
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Reddit is not an oft-cited source of news. By and large, it is a marketplace for link sharing coupled with a comment system and a currency of reputation. In other words, a forum focused on reacting to content elsewhere around the web but with some original content here and there. Where there is credible content, it is often from somewhere else like a news vendor. Everything else, including all comments on any thread, must be subjected to scrutiny and distrust as with any other forum. For starters, any comment can be a deliberately hyperbolic or entirely false/nonsensical assertion — rhetoric or sophistry — and thus no comment should be trusted on the grounds that it being correct may be coincidental if the intention was not to be correct, but rather to incite a reaction from others (trolling).
Then there is of course the possibility (indeed inevitability) that posts will be edited silently by those with sufficient permissions in the forum system, or access to the database if the system does not have silent edits built in. I say 'inevitable' because, given enough time, those with access to administrative power or the database itself will find a reason to silently edit something, by someone, somewhere.
No forum should be treated as credible. Even if your study is about how forum users behave, you cannot trust those you study to be behaving normally as their intentions are always questionable. We don't have Asimov's psycho-history yet.
I do not think forums have ever been credible sources of information, and I have participated in discussions on forums for fifteen years now. HN has more credibility than others, but that has been earned by clever people who visit this community for the sake of discussing intellectual topics — not the founding ideal of Reddit.
If the US has had congress hearings on the basis of Reddit posts, as was stated in a comment above, that is testament only to the ignorance of the US congress.
Edit: if you mean viability when you say credibility, i.e. in terms of generating revenue/getting investment, that depends on the rationality of its current/future investors. Assuming rational behaviour, this probably won't make any difference. The users will still come and if anything Reddit users should feel better precisely because the CEO fessed up to silent edits. It means that the issue can be addressed, perhaps with PGP signatures as suggested by others here; the ability to make silent edits by administrators could be removed; and the code powering Reddit could be open-sourced to prove that (apologies if it already is open-source, I am ignorant of the state of Reddit's back-end).
I personally want to see more corporate leadership taking responsibility and leadership for backing up their personal views and those of their employees. A good example is how Grubhub's CEO Matt Maloney sent a company-wide email about the culture of the company that I respect quite a lot. http://media.grubhub.com/media/press-releases/press-release-...
Now do I agree with exactly what /u/spez did? Personally, the vindictive part of me likes the idea of fucking around with the morons in that subreddit. But as the ceo of the company, no. If it was any employee that had done it, they would likely have been terminated or at least had a severe write-up, no matter how much the leadership agreed with it. But when its the ceo, I'm not sure what the outcome will/should be.
To be completely honest, we have to remember that reddit is a company and not the public airwaves. There is no requirement that it be a bastion of free speech for all users. If I were running reddit, I would have banned that subreddit months ago. Any users found to be making racist, homophobic, hateful, or any other kind of similar commentary would have been permabanned a long time ago. The internet is a big place and its already too full of negativity. There are no socially positive reasons to provide places for it to fester.
I'm guessing that's likely because you agree with the political stances of Spez and Mr Maloney. Would you be equally supportive of a leader of a large company espousing the virtue of traditional gender roles or other socially conservative stances?
The key is to look in the comments, not in the main post itself.
Two good examples of this are Chick-fil-a and Hobby Lobby. (I worked for Chick-fil-a briefly when I was a teenager. I appreciated never having to work on a Sunday.) Both of these companies establish policies based on the belief structures of their founders. I readily admit to being an liberal atheist and am proud to stand behind that. While I may not agree personally with those policies, the companies are very forthcoming about them and as a customer, it helps me to make decisions about whether I am comfortable or not doing business with them.
To be even more specific, I want leadership of companies to be more open and honest with these things specifically because we have a lot of hard-won laws in the US to prevent discrimination. I want conservative leadership to be called out and potentially punished when they violate the law, rather than being allowed to execute their discriminatory beliefs in private and hide them under made-up reasons.
Now just to round that last statement out, I do not stand for other progressives and liberals to discriminate against people just because they hold personal conservative viewpoints. As long as everyone is obeying the law and not letting their beliefs affect the lives of others, I seriously couldn't care less what they think. Do I personally believe that conservatives are lacking in basic levels of education and compassion for other people? Yes, yes I do. Do I believe that those people should somehow be discriminated against just because they are happy to discriminate against other people? No, I don't.
So I guess to summarize the answer to your question: Yes I have similar political stances as those two, but I want more openness among all corporate leadership because it makes it much easier and clearer to decide which companies to do business with.