[basch]

Reddit was founded upon values of free speech, at least that is what people were told at the time, even if it wasnt true in the back rooms.

I think the biggest concern is when platforms start to police illegal speech, and countries make political dissent illegal.

[vectorpush]

Personally, I've always viewed reddit's approach to moderation as non-interventionist and not as something that necessarily enshrined the ideals of free-speech. That is to say, it all seemed more of a growth-hack than anything else; outsource moderation to individual communities and set a policy of non-intervention so that when people complain to the admins they can say something like "subreddits are owned and operated by users, don't complain to us", this formula scaled very nicely and reddit exploded into the behemoth it is today.

But now that reddit has become something of a cultural focal point on the internet, it's started to draw attention from the media at large and suddenly the operators felt a little embarrassed that they had to defend subreddits such as /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/jailbat, /r/niggers etc. So I imagine they just said "fuck it, it's more trouble than it's worth", and despite a month or two of banhammer-whack-a-mole with fuck-stupid-dictator-sjw-cunt-ellen-mao subreddits, the site continued to flourish, and all the free-speech purists finally woke up to the startling truth that reddit.com was really just an internet startup and not a platform to empower the oppressed masses...

Until they banned another subreddit.