That said, I think the moderation Pao symbolised on Reddit as a whole was a very wrong move. The Community certainly did. All the subreddits are individually moderated and the subreddits are opt-in; there's very little need for an overarching moderation of Reddit major.
Combine this with the rules for moderation being so vague everyone was asking what they actually were, and the reason given was "safety". Safety?
To me, "Safety" is a red-cloth term. It smells of the agenda used to rule the masses by fear and security, and to me Reddit is the exact opposite. But in reality, it was probably just an honest answer to Reddit's Community and investors both, that they wanted Reddit to be a safe product.
Well, nobody joined Reddit because it was "safe". It's the wild west of the interwebs, subreddits progressively darker as you find more weird stuff and you have to tell yourself "no - I don't need that" (who hasn't ventured to r/aww - darkness comes in many shades).
tl;dr Reddit is set up as a wild west with moderated towns, it is counter-productive to clamp down on everything with "safety" as the rallying cry.