Following six months of internal reviews and a March survey of 15,000 users, reddit's top administrators announced a new initiative to enforce the site's anti-harassment rules above and beyond the site's usual "subreddit" moderation system. The Thursday announcement claimed that "the number one reason redditors do not recommend the site—even though they use it themselves—is because they want to avoid exposing friends to hate and offensive content."

"We’ve always encouraged freedom of expression by having a mostly hands-off approach to content shared on our site," the administrators wrote at reddit's official blog, noting that top-level moderation had previously been limited to concerns of "privacy and safety." The post went on to describe examples of harassment and abuse over the years, including links to other sites that indirectly violated reddit's private-information rules that made users "avoid participating for fear of their personal and family safety."

To change that, the administrators posted a definition of harassment that hadn't previously appeared on the site: "Systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone in a way that would make a reasonable person (1) conclude that reddit is not a safe platform to express their ideas or participate in the conversation, or (2) fear for their safety or the safety of those around them." (That definition has yet to be added to reddit's official rules page.) They then encouraged affected users to report offending reddit content—either public or private—directly to the site's highest level contact e-mail address.

However, the post only directed the community to file reports when they noticed harassment, as opposed to confirming any efforts on reddit's part to actively look for or moderate offending content. Additionally, the update didn't include any calls to current subreddit moderators to join in anti-harassment efforts, nor did it clarify whether reports must be filed by victims of anyone who violated the new rules or whether bystanders can file the reports as well.

Shadow banning: "an ugly hack"

While the update didn't indicate exactly how reddit will enforce violations, reddit community manager Jessica Moreno indicated in a discussion that offending users (including even subreddit moderators) would be banned and given an opportunity to e-mail reddit's mods in response.

In the same discussion thread, reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian acknowledged issues with the site's practice of "shadow-banning"—which hides all posts and votes by a user from the public without informing the banned user—and called it "an ugly hack" that was originally created to "neuter" spammers in the site's early days. He also told users that a fix for that practice "hasn't come soon enough; that's on us."

While the cited March 2015 study found that 50 percent of "extremely dissatisfied" reddit users blamed "hateful or offensive content and community," it also found that 35 percent of that set of users was unhappy due to "heavy handed moderation and censorship."

The Thursday announcement followed a Wednesday update from administrators about the site's disclosure procedure when reddit posts are taken down due to copyright or trademark claims, along with a change in the site's rules in February about the posting of revenge porn.

Ars Technica and reddit are owned by the same parent company, Advance Publications, Inc.