Thing is, before they started hellbanning all of those subreddits (TrayvonMartin, fatpeoplehate, etc.) I had no idea they even existed. For 8 years I've been blissfully unaware of all the garbage subreddits popping up.
Well then consider yourself lucky that your favourite subreddits weren't targets. I spend way too much time on reddit and I have had to retreat from a few subreddits because of the FPH brigaders (using RES to tag them so I could see when a wave of them hit a sub).
I was close to losing all hope just before they banned it. It would not have surprised me to see Conde Nast pull the plug on reddit before the end of 2015 had they not banned it.
FPH was somehow slowly taking over reddit. Probably because its members had more free time on their hands than average redditors. Also, there were 150.000 of them.
Conde Nast is not part of the ownership structure of reddit. Conde Nast is owned by the major owner of reddit, Advance Publications, but reddit has not been part of Conde Nast for years. The ownership also got more diffuse last year:
FatPeopleHate was really recent. It exploded in popularity. It wasn't even a year old when it got banned.
That was a lot of the issue, it grew faster than it could be controlled and when it started having the population to push posts to /r/all, people got mad.
> i wonder if non-reddit-users think of the entire reddit community as hateful...
Reddit is pretty much a byword for "steaming mound of vileness" around various chunks of the 'net. A couple of years ago I would have said it was no worse than old-school Usenet, but it seems to be increasingly suffering from the same problem Digg did before it died, of brigading, upvoting cartels, and so on. FPH is a high profile example, but there's a constant wash of racist brigading many of the defaults, even sweeping into dataisbeautiful after the Charleston church massacre.
> i wonder if non-reddit-users think of the entire reddit community as hateful...
They certainly do. My better half tried using reddit for a couple days 4 or 5 years ago, encountered some vile / bitter people, and decided that it just wasn't worth it. She won't go near it again.
