I think you're being a bit over-dramatic with the "wretched hive of scum and villany" stuff. The commonality of this sort of behavior varies from forum to forum, depending on the mood of that forum. For instance, this sort of thing was not abnormal at all during the hey-day of Something Awful (One of the largest forums around some years ago, still #5 in membership numbers).

As far as the editing Spez did, if they were really out there calling him a pedophile, they should have expected some backlash. You can only push an authority figure so far before they're going to go on the defensive. This will definitely make things worse though.

Of course I'm being a bit dramatic. But it's pretty bad.

I didn't know that was so common on SA. I knew the site was heavily-moderated, despite The Goons' famous repuation. But it's still terrible there, too.

The rest of reddit will accept this because everyone hates /r/the_donald anyway. That subreddit is an abuse of the system already.

This brings up memories of when moot messed with /pol/. He turned off the spam prevention scripts and captcha, made every post look like a doubles post, and let an audio recording of cuck porn play on the board page. That was sort of expected from moot though and it was 4chan after all.

Well, yes.

but he didn't mess with any of the content of any messages.

If he did, the entire chan would have gone up in flames.

The content was subject to a large amount of wordfilters at the time, which would alter half the posts.

...but those were public. It's one thing to have a computer run search and replace on every post in the board. It's quite another to have a mod specifically edit your post, making it look like you said something you didn't.

I've been wondering about exactly that - would the perception of this be so negative if spez had inserted javascript to rewrite the messages on that subreddit instead?

No, because that would rewrite everybody's messages. And it would be noticed immediately, so it wouldn't even matter, practically.

In what way is it an abuse of the system?

They arent democrats

I was once on a forum where you could pay some of your karma to change someone else's signature. It was pretty good fun.

That's very different from changing the actual message text. That lends itself to "disregard that, I suck cocks." Editing content leads to, well, you saw.

I don't agree. Chan admins and mods are known for messing with users all the time. This kind of silent word filtering seems right up their alley.

Banning Pizzagate (as absurd as it is) would definitely have created an uproar, though, much like banning Gamergate did.

Filtering isn't the same as editing. If you filter, it's automated, and thus fairly obvious. If you edit, you are actually changing somebody's perceived opinion.

This pretty much happened on 4chan with GamerGate and /pol/. Banning GamerGate discussion immediately drove a mass exodus away from the site, and persistently fucking with /pol/ pushed out many more. But 4chan didn't die. The overwhelming majority of 4chan users voted with their clicks that they would tolerate politically motivated censorship, datamining, and adverserial moderation for faster boards and a fatter meme pipeline.

Reddit is exactly the same. Keep pulling shit like this, and it will drive quality users away out of principle. But Zombie Reddit will keep lurching forward, spewing poorly compressed Facebook screencaps and cat gifs.

No it didn't. People were banned, but nobody edited message text. That's a huge difference.

Mods used to edit posts to "I AM A HUGE FAGGOT" etc. all of the time, and people just laughed. Point is you are overestimating the principles of the average 4channer. The sky has fallen on them repeatedly and they just don't care. I see no reason for the drooling Redditards to be any different.

Huh. Oh well. I guess I need to brush up on my *chan history.

But I do maintain that that's a little different. That's essentially another instance of "disregard that, I suck cock," whereas spez actually altered people's stated opinions.

I have been using Reddit to discuss problems with Go programming language and now VueJS. It is fine.

Some subreddits may be "wretched hive of scum an villany", you can't say that the entire website is like that.

I was explicitly talking about the company. some of the smaller (and even a few of the larger) subreddits are quite good.

Oh, I'm sorry I misunderstood you.