Reddit Launches New Harassment Rules

Reddit is banning a handful of its worst communities. “Our goal is to enable as many people as possible to have authentic conversations and share ideas and content on an open platform,” “We want as little involvement as possible in managing these interactions but will be involved when needed to protect privacy and free expression, and to prevent harassment.”

One of the bans will include the only subreddit with more than 5,000 subscribers — is r/fatpeoplehate, a forum devoted to posting pictures of overweight people for ridicule. Also, four more subreddits have been names.as r/

1. r/hamplanethatred
2.  r/transfags
3. r/neofag
4.  r/shitniggerssay

They’ve all now been shut down, with a message stating:  “for violating the Reddit rules to keep everyone safe.” According to reddit these last four ranged from 149 to 3071 subscribers, although in r/fatpeoplehate’s case, “more than 5,000” is a bit of an understatement; the last Reddit metrics (and a Google cached page) put it at around 151,000 subscribers.

The changes have been made by Reddit this morning, there is approx 650,000 subreddits on the website, each one requires moderating and looking after. Over the past few years, Reddit has restricted the anything goes rule, to exclude sexual photos of minors, leaks of celeb nudes and more.

Deciding on what is banned and what is not could be a difficult problem for Reddit, especially because it’s hard to agree what harassment is actually constituted of.

Thank you to TheVerge for providing us with this information

Image courtesy of Reddit