Reddit finally bans its most infamous racist communities


Reddit CEO Steve Huffman announced the link sharing and community site’s new content policy, which is mostly in line with the proposal he put forward in late July.

Mostly, everything will be the same, except that some “subreddit” communities will be “Quarantined” away, meaning that their content will be totally invisible to the ordinary Reddit user unless they specifically opt in to see it.

There was one surprise, though: Huffman announced that CoonTown, probably Reddit’s most notorious racist community, was officially banned from the site, as of today — a reversal from his original position that it would stay on Reddit, merely quarantined away.

“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,” Huffman writes in a post announcing the changes.

Other banned subreddits include a bunch of CoonTown affiliate communities, at least one of which has a name not worth repeating here because it incorporates a racial slur. When Huffman first proposed his content policies, the CoonTown community celebrated what it took as an implicit vote of support from Reddit’s leadership.

Since that original content policy proposal, Reddit has had something of a brain drain, with plenty of talent leaving the company. In the meanwhile, Reddit’s traffic is surging to all-time highs.

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