How can you know they won't try to make Saidit more like reddit and start campaigning for banning unsavoury opinions?

They will, and they have.

I'd rather have a small group of regulars that posts interesting stuff rather than a large group of people with a higher total of regular users with interesting stuff.

Well it's not between those two things, if that was the choice then I'd agree with you. And now that we have a lot more users, that might be the choice. But 6 months ago the choice was "have a small but interesting userbase, or have an even smaller but interesting userbase with some super pissed off people who are constantly maligning saidit on reddit".

But anyway, this is changing as we grow. We won't need to worry about this threat anymore once we reach a certain size, so I won't need to hesitate to "take out the trash".

you've got a flamewar going.

Flamewars break the pyramid of debate rule, so that's already covered.

I don't want saidit to get the reputation that Voat has

I've literally spent hundreds and hundreds of hours making this site because of how much I hate how voat has turned out. Trust me, I'm not going to let it happen.