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.
It is much more honest and within reason to take steps like deleting posts, suspending or even outright banning users.
It's Reddit. It's an Internet forum run by a private corporation. The users in question abusing spez have zero right to their speech on the platform. You have zero recourse if Reddit edits your comments.
Nuke /r/the_donald, nuke the users and hellban their IPS of those who sent abusive messages, and let's move on. Bask in the irony when I say, "Drain the swamp"
Free speech ends when it's become harrasment. What happened to spez calls for digitally curb stomping the offenders.
This is no different from Twitter having to cull accounts harassing others.
It would be like you posting a Twitter message that says "I hate Donald Trump" and Twitter transparently changing that message to "I hate Tim Cook" so that anybody reading your timeline thinks you're someone you aren't. See the problem now? Now imagine if Twitter's management was taken over tomorrow and this actually happens.
Would you not be a little bit outraged?
If it doesn't care about the principles of free speech (principles, not the amendment) then it should stop giving fake lip service to it.
Also, what you say isn't really true. 4chan does a good job of not censoring anything that isn't obviously illegal.
Any chat system built on top of the blockchain for that matter would actually be impossible to censor.
Or even just a simple email list, is in some sense an uncensored chat room.
Or text messages. Or phone calls.
All of these are in some sense, technology assisted chat services, run by private parties. And I'd describe them all as "bastions of free speech".
What if, to prevent harassment, your phone company listened to all of its customers phone calls and selective moderated them whenever you said a bad word? That is the equivalent.