"Something I’ve said many times is that the only way to scale moderation online is by working alongside our community members and the moderators..."

"... because they have the context to decide whether an individual piece of content is hateful or not, for example. Which means that if we don’t have agreement from our moderators and our communities that these are the rules that we’re all going to abide by, then a community that’s not willing to work with us has no place on Reddit. And I think that became abundantly clear with The_Donald over the years, and even the past few months.... The mission of Reddit is to bring community and belonging to everybody in the world. And we’ve long had this debate on Reddit and internally, weighing the trade-offs between speech and safety. There’s certain speech — for example, harassment and hate — that prevents other people from speaking. And if we have individuals and communities on Reddit that are preventing other people from using Reddit the way we intend, then that means they’re working directly against our mission.... When we started Reddit 15 years ago, we didn’t ban things. And it was easy, as it is for many young people, to make statements like that* because, one, I had more rigid political beliefs and, two, I lacked perspective and real-world experience. Over the years, we’ve been increasingly confronted with difficult decisions, and we have to weigh these trade-offs. And so here we are, believing that free speech and free expression are really important, and that’s one of the things that makes Reddit special, but at the same time, seeing that allowing everything is working against our mission."

From "Reddit’s C.E.O. on Why He Banned ‘The_Donald’ Subreddit/Steve Huffman, Reddit’s co-founder and chief executive, says new rule changes will help the company fulfill its mission" (NYT).

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* In 2018, Huffman — refusing to ban the subreddit The_Donald — said "There are arguments on both sides, but ultimately, my view is that their anger comes from feeling like they don’t have a voice, so it won’t solve anything if I take away their voice."