Reddit users are switching in their droves to the lookalike site Voat, following Reddit's decision to ban five subreddits.
Yesterday, the so-called front page of the internet announced that it was closing down r/hamplanethatred, r/transfags, r/neofag, and r/shitniggerssay, as well as r/fatpeoplehate - by far the biggest of the five, with over 150,000 subscribers.
"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," explain Reddit's head of community and support Jessica Moreno, interim CEO Ellen Pao and founder Alexis Ohanian.
"We want to be open about our involvement: We will ban subreddits that allow their communities to use the subreddit as a platform to harass individuals when moderators don’t take action. We’re banning behavior, not ideas."
Tackling the narratives of online harassment, tech journalist and Harvard Law School graduate Sarah Jeong explores the precarious question: How do we filter content from the garbage?
Unsurprisingly, the move has attracted criticism: both from those that think the site's banning too much and from those that think it's banning too little.
It has, for instance allowed r/coontown to stay, on the basis that there have been no reports of members harassing individuals.
"When we are using the word "harass", we're not talking about "being annoying" or vote manipulation or anything," writes one adminstrator.
"We're talking about men and women whose lives are being affected and worry for their safety every day, because people from a certain community on reddit have decided to actually threaten them, online and off, every day."
Many users, though, believe the site is straying too far from its 'anything goes' origins. Over the last few years, it's cracked down on sexually suggestive pictures of children, so-called creep shots and hacked nude photographs of celebrities - although in the case of this last, it claimed the reason was copyright rather than morality.
There are good commercial reasons for Reddit to start trying to limit the amount of offensive content it hosts. Last month, announcing plans to try and eliminate harassment, it revealed that the main reason users don't recommend the site to their friends, even though they use it themselves, is that they don't want to expose those friends to the nastier corners of the site.
And there are also shareholders to consider, following a $50 million investment last year from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and others that could see pressure for Reddit to take more mainstream ads. Racism homphobia and other prejudice really isn't a good look.
But one site's loss is another's gain: right now, one of the most popular threads on Reddit is a discussion of alternative sites.
And Switzerland-based Voat, a site which mimics Reddit in both function and appearance, has been putting on users by the thousand since the Reddit move was announced. Indeed, its most popular thread at the time of writing is 'Welcome to all new users from the last round of censorship!'.
Many commenters say they are making the move on principle, rather than because they can't get through the day without taunting a fat person or two.
"It's become painfully obvious that Reddit is no longer a platform that protects free speech (especially after they literally admitted they don't care about it!), and after today's banning of subreddits with "harassment" I can't stay any longer," writes one.
"They are basically digging their own grave with these latest policy changes. But hey, at least Chairman Pao is happy, right? Right?"
But with 160,000 members between them, the closure of the five sites means there are now a lot of trolls roaming free. Not all will switch to Voat. Indeed, Reddit itself won't find it easy to get rid of them: already, former members of r/fatpeoplehate have tried (with only temporary success) to set up a series of clone threads on the site.
And bear in mind that this is almost certainly just the start. Just five threads have been closed, out of a total of more than 350,000 - in other words, Reddit is almost certainly just dipping its toes in the water at this stage, and more closures are likely to come.
So far, though, the many threads abusing Ellen Pao remain...
