Very juvenile and unprofessional way of dealing with the situation, really erodes trust in the platform (simply deleting the comment would have been a better response).
Would maybe expect this from the founder of a young fledgling startup, but the 33 year old CEO of a company like Reddit ought to know better.
I don't mind Reddit fucking up. If they were competent they would have monetized the users a long time ago and it would be an broken mess that feeds daily spam to my inbox like every other social media platform. Reddit is too valuable to take seriously.
It's like an ISP knowing a significant portion of your web browsing behaviour.
And since now we know that the CEO (at least?) has edited comments, users' comment history should be considered suspect..
If you're concerned about the outbound link issue, disable javascript. A cursory look at the page source should convince you that that's the only way they can track outbound clicks.