You may be reading the causality backwards. My guess is that Reddit's recent changes to policy and crackdowns on abusive communities are to avoid the kinds of controversies that would be damaging for a publicly-traded company.
You can have free speech or you can have "hate speech."
Hate is an emotion, a label people apply to the way they feel. The way you feel is your choice. Emotions and feelings are variable and subjective.
Freedom is absolute and objective, something is free or it isn't.
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it's exciting to imagine
What exactly excites you about such a scenario, from an open discourse and marketplace of ideas perspective?
Are you sure? My country defines it in a legal sense, along with many others.
I think tolerating hate speech will eventually cause all speech to become hate speech.