reddit has harmed its own community standards immeasurably by steadfastly refusing to rein in its most problematic communities, the_donald being one of them. They've only ever dealt with issues when the chorus of negative PR becomes so much that their hand is forced, as what happened with jailbait, fatpeoplehate, and a few others.

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.

I wonder if the presence of a controversial subreddit like the_donald is good for business, increasing discussion, site traffic and thus revenue? Perhaps Reddit has a financial incentive to encourage (or at least not punish) subreddit drama.

Most probably. It's about the current US president after all, and it's the closest thing to an official forum/social network his fanbase/supporters have.

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.

T_D went to voat already back when I still used it (I gave up because they refused to add the ability to mute users), they couldn't handle it for even a week.

IMO, reddit banning t_d would create much more serious issues for them. The last thing they want is to get attention as a possible campaign financer. Even tho political choice is not a protected category and it's not illegal for reddit to ban t_d, since t_d clearly defines itself as rally sub for president, t_d mods follow rules and ban offending accounts quickly, and, most importantly, President Trump filed his campaign for 2020. with FEC almost immediately after becoming president.

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.

I think that's probably it, or at the very least part of it. TD has been a well-trafficed subreddit for a long time, and that means ad revenue.

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.

the_donald was censored too.

I find it funny that the focus is on the_donald. I use reddit a lot and there are numerous other subreddits that have pulled similar things and they've existed long before the_Donald became a thing. SRS being one of them.

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.