I think reddit realized that having prominent subs posting photos of 14 year old girls wasn’t something they wanted to be in their public image at all

It’s basically a non-starter; all “free speech absolutist” websites are. I think Moot said that 4chan didn’t make any money because they were radioactive to advertisers. Voat died because they couldn’t attract advertisers. The remaining right-wing social media sites are all running at a loss as far as anyone can determine.

I don’t feel like reddit became hostile to conservatives as much as conservatives who were hostile showed up

Maybe a bad choice of words on my part. I 100% agree that conservatives basically invaded the site during the leadup to the 2016 election and proceeded to harass the existing user base until the admins were forced to step in. Even then the admins did the minimum they possibly could and slow-walked everything. Conservatives got every opportunity to course-correct and basically refused.

A lot of Reddit is hostile to conservatives now and they definitely earned that ire.

I’m not sure if /r/conservative even existed before ~2015.

That sub was created Jan 25, 2008. Interestingly enough, it seems /r/christianity was created at the same time. I don’t remember anyone being aware of either sub - much less caring about them - prior to /r/the_donald. Reddit was pretty fine with conservative subs before they started showing up in everybody’s gaming and knitting subs calling everybody cucks and baby murderers.

Personally I feel like a lot of it was organized astroturf, not even necessarily from inside the US.

Everything about the genesis of /r/the_donald feels like organized to me. That shit came out of nowhere. If I had to guess, it’s something similar to Steve Bannon’s strategy to target gamers and the gamergate fiasco.