It's much worse than that. The people doing the banning on reddit aren't doing it because they are paid or told to, they are doing it because they think stopping wrongthink is a public service and will feel right doing it every time.

HN isn't much better with flagging of posts. The highwater mark of this was PG's heresy post being kept off the front page for 6 hours before dang made the post unflaggable. I would have loved to see the Monday meeting where he had to explain why that was needed.