Reddit higher-ups have made it clear that they are unwilling to allow the website's more unsavory communities to tarnish its reputation as a whole. In a phone interview, Martin told me, "There isn't any community that would like being judged by the worst 0.0001 percent of its users." By banning r/niggers, Reddit's leaders have continued to establish reasonable benchmarks for what the site will and will not tolerate, a measure that will allow it to continue to amass mainstream credibility.

As the offensive name implies, r/niggers was a place for users to bond over their disdain for black people. While Reddit itself boasts 69.9 million monthly users, r/niggers had only 6,000 members. On the other hand, on a percentage basis, it was one of Reddit's fastest growing online communities this year.

Visiting r/niggers was a mental chore. Emblazoned with icons like watermelons and fried chicken legs, the site maintained a rotating roster of photographs of whites who have presumably been the victims of violence by blacks, as if no white person has ever committed a violent crime. Most of the community's content was about what you'd expect: news stories about crimes committed by blacks, pseudoscience about black inferiority, and personal anecdotes about troublesome interactions with black people.

While the subreddit's postings were unquestionably racist and offensive, what was really disturbing about r/niggers was the way the group's commentary and subscribers seeped into the broader Reddit community at large. It became a launching pad for excursions into the rest of Reddit. This particular dark corner of the web was never merely content to stay in its corner; its members ventured out.

Earlier this year, r/blackgirls, a Reddit community "that caters to the interests/support of all the black girls who are also Redditors," got a first-hand look at what r/niggers is capable of.

After a user at r/niggers noticed that the r/blackgirls moderator was inactive, and thus not actively monitoring posts to ban rule-breaking users, another suggested flooding the subreddit with racist comments and content, commonly known as "brigading." He commented:

Lets go to work

I think its time for some raysist poitry an shit

Roses are red, violets are blue

How come all black girls smell like poo?

I dont really this to be this crude

their pussies smell like dead seafood

The hair on their head belongs on their snatch

The drapes and the curtains do more then match

They are the very same fucking thing

Nasty pube headed afrikin queen

After his comments offended his target audience, he gleefully added, "they didnt seem to care very much for my comments... Have been trolling hard for a few hours and there is still so much possibility...it[']s endless."

For the next few weeks, r/niggers users flooded r/blackgirls with racist comments on regular contributor's posts, racist posts of their own, and even sent racist private messages to r/blackgirls users.