You may be reading it wrong. It sounds like they don't want an environment in which people aren't sure what is allowed or not allowed. "Careful to restrict spee

You may be reading it wrong. It sounds like they don't want an environment in which people aren't sure what is allowed or not allowed. "Careful to restrict speech" in the sense that you don't want to go overboard with rules and moderation because you end up trading one problem (bad behavior from bad citizens) for another (an overly sanitized and controlled environment). OTOH, even your interpretation makes some degree of sense to me. When a community turns toxic, the bad behavior from the bad citizens drives away all of the good citizens who are positive contributors. It's just like mailing lists or discussion sites like HN. Personal attacks beget more personal attacks, and eventually so much of the comments are malicious or stupid that people who actually have something to contribute go elsewhere. An extreme example would be YouTube comments. If you see a bunch of terrible comments that barely parse as human language, you are that much more unlikely to leave a well-written comment because why bother? It'd be pearls before swine (if all the comments are terrible, then the people who bother reading the comments are likely also terrible). It sounds like Reddit is just trying to avoid the downward spiral that almost every electronic community goes through eventually, but are aware that taking this too far could have a chilling effect on the larger, more constructive community that they want to retain.