> "The reddit admins (of the time; it's mostly a different group now) really did not like SRS. In attempting to force the admins to take their side, they would dox them, send bad shit to their family members, etc. It was really bad. Despite this, the admins never cracked but they really hated them."
And somehow weren't banned for this? Futher down they say that they just want to make the site better, but 90% of that is just about building tools to stop (in order of importance) harrasment of users by other subreddits, fighting within a subreddit and (c) poor topic discipline.
Eventually they learn from this:
"11/ ... bans ALL the problematic subreddits. F* your free speech, this is why we can't have nice things.
12/ They've had peace so far, so I guess that was probably the right policy"
I'm old enough to remember when people ran unmoderated newsgroups and open mail relays for free speech reasons. They either drowned in spam or were gradually blocked by so much of the rest of the internet that their position became untenable.
If you build a system that doesn't deal with spam, it gets drowned in spam. If you build a system that doesn't deal with abuse, abuse becomes commonplace. If you don't secure your IoT devices you get journalists DDoSed by lightbulbs. It's the same kind of social responsibility.
What makes this problem worse in the mid-20-teens is that there are hate groups organising off-board to cause these problems.
See the discussion of VR harrasment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12777340