Reddit CEO admits to altering user comments that were critical of him

I can't be the only one that finds this pretty funny, right? Forget about whatever dumb imagined political angle of it. If you go on someone's website and spam "fuck [admin's name]" and call them a pedophile based on ridiculous accusations, it's probably only just because of misplaced mercy that you're not banned for harassment right off the bat. These aren't paying users, and they don't have personal data locked up in their accounts that they may lose access to. Whatever forum they're posting to owes them nothing and they do worse than spit on that. That a wordfilter gets applied to some posts of some users that were basically asking for a ban is pretty funny.

I've helped run a popular forum before. We added silly global wordfilters at times, and on a couple occasions when seriously-rule-breaking users repeatedly evaded bans, we applied customized wordfilters to them to help drive them off. (Dropping all of the vowels that weren't at the start or end of a word from their posts to make it look like lazy teenager txtspeak was a favorite.) It worked and people found it hilarious.

Reddit used to be a place where intelligent users had a quality discussion. It used to happen. At least in my imagination. What I see now is a machine which produces memes (still going strong there) and propaganda (growing stronger) but the discussion is on a much lower intellectual level.