

Reddit Finally Bans R/CoonTown and Other Hateful Subreddits - dll
http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/05/reddit-finally-bans-rcoontown-and-other-hateful-subreddits-updates-user-policies/

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x0
Excellent. The racist users were spilling over into other subreddits. Just
like how, before fatpeoplehate got banned, there were users going around
making comments like "found the fatty". The /r/CoonTown posters were even
worse in my opinion.

There will be a tantrum for a few days, but they'll get bored soon. It's like
ripping off a bandaid quickly. Users like that just ruin the entire site for
everyone.

Edit: apologies if this comment appears multiple times, posting from a train,
poor connection.

~~~
cLeEOGPw
Are you living/have lived in black neighborhood or met any black people in
real life at all?

~~~
tptacek
uh where exactly are you going with this

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tzs
And they managed to botch it. It's gone wrong on two fronts.

The announcement states that:

> Today, in addition to applying Quarantines, we are banning a handful of
> communities that exist solely to annoy other redditors, prevent us from
> improving Reddit, and generally make Reddit worse for everyone else

Numerous commentators in the discussion of the new content policy pointed out
that /r/coontown, loathsome as it was, does not seem to meet any of their
criteria for banning.

Spez clarified:

> We didn't ban them for being racist. We banned them because we have to spend
> a disproportionate amount of time dealing with them. If we want to improve
> Reddit, we need more people, but CT's existence and popularity has also made
> recruiting here more difficult.

I couldn't find any further elaboration. In particular I'd like to know if
"disproportionate amount of time dealing with them" actually meant dealing
with things /r/coontown did, or dealing with people complaining about the
existence of it.

It probably would have been a lot better if they had tried quarantining them
first, to see if that worked. /r/coontown clearly met the conditions for
quarantine: "We will Quarantine communities whose content would be considered
extremely offensive to the average redditor".

The way they handled it left a lot of people thinking that yet again the
published rules and the real rules do not match.

The second front on which this has gone wrong is /r/ShitRedditSays. Numerous
people have pointed out that SRS exists solely to annoy other redditors.
People posted numerous detailed documentation of SRS brigading, doxxing, and
harassing people. As Spez tried to clarify the new policies, specifically to
explain the justification for the bannings, many people pointed out most of
his justifications applied to SRS. Spez has pretty much ignored those
comments. I believe the last time he commented on SRS was in an earlier thread
where he said they know about the brigading, but they want to stop it with
technical means rather than banning.

Looks like there is still a lot of work ahead for Reddit.

