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Okay a serious question: at what point does it make sense for these hedge fund guys to just purchase reddit and shut it down?It would be irrelevant even if they could. The problem is/was not Reddit/WSB, but rather the positions that the hedge funds put themselves in.
Where are/were the PhDs in risk analysis at these places? How do you get into a position of shorts being >120% of the total float?
Take Willian Gibson's 'Law':
* The future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed.
And take the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH):
* The price of a security reflects all the available information about it.
And when you combine them you have the principle that the information is out there (too many short contracts), but it wasn't evenly distributed—yet.† Until someone noticed it, and it started to spread, and that caused people to change their positions in GME.
Shutting down Reddit, or any other random forum, isn't going to stop someone from noticing the shorts.
This is no different than what happened in The Big Short: some folks noticed discrepancies (e.g., mortgage delinquencies) and acted first, and as that information spread the market "corrected" its price. It's just that it ended up causing the Great Recession.
The spread of information isn't instantaneous either: at the very least it is limited by the speed of light. After that, it's limited by either (a) human attention spans, and/or (b) the machine learning systems that humans programmed in automated systems.
† Edit: I propose this phenomenon, if not labelled already, be called "Gibson's Market Corollary".
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Now the price of GME is kind of meta though, in that it doesn't reflect on what's know about GameStop, but rather someone 'related' to GameStop.