I can see why they might want someone with the ability to edit posts (removing extreme TOS stuff - racism, hate speech etc). But that's probably not for the CEO and certainly shouldn't be used simply to "troll the trolls"
Also it's baffling to me that the CEO of reddit is a regular user and somehow isn't up in arms about how irritating it is to use the site.
> Deletion seems far superior, do you want people to go around editing out the racism of peoples posts?
The generous argument for would be it preserves any redeeming value in the offending comment. The practical answer is he (EDIT: spez) wanted something to rail against.
I'm not sure that's right. If your website is saying I said something I didn't say then that's an issue. Sure, have the ability to remove or annotate posts that break the rules in some way but to leave a post up saying something other than what the poster wrote seems bad (and possibly even libellous) to me.
Also it's baffling to me that the CEO of reddit is a regular user and somehow isn't up in arms about how irritating it is to use the site.