Did they? I didn't know about that, but I'm not surprised. Still, it shows how tolerant they were if it took him to make them say something.

I remember reading something from spez (I think) to the effect of "We asked him to tone it down, and he did." And I think pica said he'd been told to say "n-word" instead of, well, the n-word.

I have no idea why this was satisfactory to the reddits, since all it did was add a hilarious dash of ironic political correctness.

I really doubt that they did...

I believe richardkulisz was also dinged. His new username is "redditcensoredme". So it does seem to only be the most extreme cases.

There are some very popular forum sites that have existed for years and maintained civility. Any Reddit-type site could learn a lot from them. They almost all have a group of core users who act as moderators and enforce a set of published rules. It's critical that they not make up the rules on the fly, otherwise users won't respect the decisions.

I think richardkulisz just misunderstood the reporting algorithm. He was a little less polite than pica, so people resented and reported him rather than downmodding and ignoring.

The reddit founders are letting the users use the report button for censorship instead of spam control -- so that's what it is. That's not good if you ask me.