Sometimes, those who are most vocal against authority, are projecting their own potential misuse of authority onto others, unable to see someone wielding power differently.
The controversy around this one was always wild to me.
Mods editing comments was the most standard behavior on every phpbb/vb board I grew up on.
His edits were clearly edited, clearly jokes, and TBH I found them pretty funny. And people were *outraged* that he had the capacity and the temerity to edit their sacrosanct posts...
It’s an abuse of power, that’s why. It doesn’t matter if it is or isn’t funny or if anybody was harmed, the act itself was improper for any engineer dealing with other peoples data and egregious lack of judgement by a CEO.
The thing is, when the mods would troll the hell out of users on the old BB's, they were doing it all the time, it was part of the culture. It happening on reddit, where a user's posts were thought to be immutable caused very understandable outrage.