I want to clarify that I don’t think he’s doing that. In fact, when that thread was recently revived, codinghorror posted:
From my perspective (not his), he was an awesome guy for coming back and helping out after what happened to him when he first joined.
Bill Gates posts on Reddit. He does the most awesome Secret Santa ever, and he does some AMAs and such. When he’s there, he sometimes answers questions about his software, often very politely. But if people demanded that he do so, I personally feel it would be reasonable for him to delete his account. Thankfully, no one does that at Reddit, so he continues to hang out there sometimes.
In my view, I didn’t get the sense that he was angry. It may have looked like that because he inactivated his account. I think he just realized that with all the confusion, he wasn’t helping the conversation, as TroutMan explained.
Back in 2012 when codinghorror stopped answering questions about the software, someone here emailed him, demanding that he return to answer questions. I don’t want to dredge that back up, so I won’t give details. It’s just an explanation for why he might have left the inactive label instead of just stopping answering. He might have wanted to pre-empt any attempts at future contact like what happened before.