if there's an interesting conversation to be had it's about governance and transparency in how online spaces are moderated, given the depth of their influence, the broadness of their reach and the relative power wielded by those who control the platform (hello there!). Unfortunately that conversation is mostly absent from these threads.

That conversation in general has been and continues to be had over and over again on HN, so even if this is a good occasion for substantive discussion (which I doubt), it's not as if there won't be countless opportunities in the future.

The fact that this is being done to cover up the past of a specific person who's an employee of reddit strikes me as novel, weren't the previous examples about much more general topics like covid denial?

It may be novel but I don't see that it's interesting in HN's sense of the word (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). There's a difference between the intensely-interesting quality of sensational, exciting stories, and the intellectually-interesting quality of deeper, more substantive stories. The latter are what HN is supposed to be for.

When I looked in on the discussions that were going on about this last night, they were shockingly bad flamewars about all the expected generic issues, so precisely the kind of thing we don't want here. Everything I've seen so far confirms that this story is an intense drama involving specific individuals (not just the one who shall or shall not be named, but whoever made the decisions that stirred up the outrage) that doesn't have much to teach us in general. Its primary value to HN seems to me as a good example for calibrating where to draw the ontopicness line. A teachable moment, as they used to say.