The site has too much hate speech, and it is hard to support that financially. Between the misogyny and the atheist anti-Christian bigotry, it's pretty bad. You don't have to be either a woman or a theist to see that's wrong.
The site doesn't promote hate speech, it allows free speech. Also I think you're overstating things.
The question of how to address this issue while maintaining free speech is a more complex one.
Free speech and censorship are mutually exclusive. Reddit already has mechanisms to allow community censorship (report posts, post deletion by moderators, banning, invite-only subreddits, etc.), but paid reddit employees only step in when things get out of hand.
Also the community is very fickle. Any perceived censorship by reddit employees that seems suspect and they get out the pitchforks. This has happened a few times (e.g. the Sears incident).
I do think the front page could be better filtered, though. Right now the default reddit front page is pretty... weird.
I was not proposing censorship. Reddit, as well as slashdot, HN, digg, etc. have a community process developed with the intent that the best comments make it to the top. The structure of that process determines what makes it to the top. Changes to that process can, very substantially, cut down on amount of certain classes of degenerate content. When bigotry began to appear on reddit, the reddit founders did nothing to combat it (and, indeed, slightly encouraged it). At the time, I think it would have been fairly easy to contain.
At this point, I'm not sure what can be done, since now bigots form a substantial portion of the reddit community.
For example, there was this guy named Lou Franklin who was probably the biggest bigot in the history of the site, and they took YEARS to finally ban his account.
The site doesn't promote hate speech, it allows free speech. Also I think you're overstating things.
The question of how to address this issue while maintaining free speech is a more complex one.
Free speech and censorship are mutually exclusive. Reddit already has mechanisms to allow community censorship (report posts, post deletion by moderators, banning, invite-only subreddits, etc.), but paid reddit employees only step in when things get out of hand.
Also the community is very fickle. Any perceived censorship by reddit employees that seems suspect and they get out the pitchforks. This has happened a few times (e.g. the Sears incident).
I do think the front page could be better filtered, though. Right now the default reddit front page is pretty... weird.