See, if reddit had just let the upvote/downvote system work as intended, instead of banning people for no reason at all in a lot of cases, this entire problem likely would have been avoided. And no matter what the bans should have never been permanent! We dont put people in prison FOREVER, social media accounts should also be treated with some decency.
A lot of this is because the prevalent attitude has been 'it's the internet, it doesn't matter', and that allowed people to do things that we, as a society, decided long ago that people weren't supposed to do.