Hi, mod here. When a big piece of drama gets dropped on us out of the blue, especially at a time when most of our mods are either asleep or about to go to sleep, we have to decide how to respond. Our experience is that drama brings out the worst of people, especially when people lack concrete information and are forced to resort to speculation. In the worst case it escalates to targeted harassment, which has happened before (years ago when the lead developer of Actix was harassed into hiding) and I have promised to never allow it to happen again. Waiting until we had more information seemed like the prudent choice, and in the meantime I both locked and removed the comments to prevent things from getting out of hand until we had more information to work with.

Was it a heavy handed reaction? Yes, absolutely. I would not do such a thing again without extreme cause. I further admit that when I remove comments I consciously expect anyone who actually wants to read them will immediately look at any of the dozen websites that mirror Reddit comments, whose existence I appreciate because it helps people understand that I remove comments not because they contain Inconvenient Truths that I am trying to suppress, but rather because they're low-effort or inflammatory. However, I've since been told that changes to Reddit's API have rendered these sites inoperable, which, frankly, is as annoying to me as it is to you.

I ask people to keep in mind that we are a small, loosely organized mod team trying to manage a big, big subreddit. You may look at the list of mods and think it looks like a lot, but the truth is that on any given day there's usually only one to three active mods at best. When it comes to interpersonal conflicts like the situation here, we have to be very, very careful to avert Reddit's natural tendency to attempt to enact mob justice, which is something that we cannot allow to happen. "Censorship" is not our goal, which I would hope would be obvious given the fact that even though I exterminatus'd the comments of the original thread, I left the thread itself intact, when a competent censor would have just removed the thread entirely, and then would have also removed the four(!) follow-up threads on the same topic, none of which were removed or locked.