Either they wanted their advertising money or were simply supportive of their platform/actions, but eventually it was enough for me to leave Reddit entirely.
The people attracted to those communities don't just stay in them; they spread out and infect the rest of the site as well with 4chan-style shitposting, trolling, and bigotry.
If Reddit banned it, then they'd likely drive said users to a competitor (like Voat) and divert all that media attention from Reddit to said competitor in the process.
Banning t_d could be construed as political speech, and a form of political donation. And reddit most definitely doesn't want legal inquiries of that kind, I bet they have a lot of dirty laundry there - did you guys forget how "cleanly" /r/politics switched overnight (literally) from bernie central to hillary propaganda?
They most definitely want to ban it, as demonstrated in leaked logs from private admin chat some time ago, but they do not dare.
Around the time of the comment-editing fiasco I remember a couple of other subreddits' mods saying the admins were quite friendly to the TD mods on the Reddit mod discourse. I wouldn't be surprised, considering the behavior they constantly got away with.
You also have places like ChapoTrapHouse that openly called for brigading of the Libertarian subreddit while the admins were paying close attention to the sub. Nothing happens, of course.
Nonsense. HN moderators already act with zero accountability. This is possibly the only major site that shadowbans users as a matter of course.
And of course! It is their house. Play nice, or see the impact. And they do have accountability. Users are here because it makes sense. Should that change, so will users do something else.
Nothing out of the ordinary there.
Maybe I'm wrong though, and it didn't happen here but somewhere else.
You think a critical mass of HN users would band together to bring down a social media site because the company participates in censorship?
No. It's moderated and we love it that way. I might even have been shadowbanned and I still love it. Moderation rocks!
(Not being sarcastic btw. I really do like HN moderation)
If the user's post was about the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and included baseless, highly offensive libel of the YC folks? Yeah, I don't think many people here would care. Especially since most users here understand that a website's comment database can be edited arbitrarily, it's not nearly as unthinkable as you assume. Don't like it, get your own website.
/u/spez's main mistake was pushing it as an actual change to the comments database. If he'd forced a CSS change or whatever this overblown censorship/deception narrative would never have arisen.
EDIT: So actually on https://www.reddit.com/comments/5frg1n he did actually say that he was sorry and he wouldn't do it again. That's interesting, because I have a very strong memory of that not being the case. Weird. Either there was an initial acknowledgement that didn't have any sort of apology, or I missed something. I still stand by my minimization of the thing to which he reacted.
It seems a bit like your feelings on this issue are stronger than your recollection.
I guess it'd be the instant death of the network.
That this action a) happened on Reddit + b) was mostly/quickly forgotten says a lot about the different demographics.
Audiences who largely come for cat pictures and political snark don't have to worry about CEOs breaking the 4th wall.
I've been a Redditor for 9+ years and I still am one. But today's Reddit isn't the one I signed up for.