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The people of Reddit aren't taking kindly to this straightforward new plea from the site's co-founder, Alexis Ohanian, questioning whether acts of sexism on the site have served to "belittle and ostracize" its female audience. Ohanian says "suddenly we are the cool kids," and so maybe Redditors need to cool it with the sexist comments — "with great power comes great responsibility" and all of that. To which, of course, some Redditors have already claimed that the powers that be at Reddit have crossed the line and that Ohanian "hates free speech"* because he doesn't think people should call women (or anyone else) terrible things on the Internet.

To be sure, Ohanian insists, "Diversity does not end at gender or sexuality or race," but he admits that Reddit "has largely been defined by not-poor straight white men over the years" — not to mention, we might add, creepshots and jailbait subreddits littered with lengthy sexist threads. Indeed, Ohanian prefaces his post on the occasion of last week's firing of developer Adria Richards, which led to a conversation about free speech and sexism in the tech world — a conversation that got pretty gross on Reddit. To which Ohanian asks: "Aren't we better than this? I’m not talking about the trolls. I'm talking about how many (otherwise reasonable-seeming) people I saw who were comfortable and self-righteous in calling a woman a bitch/cunt/etc from their Twitter, Hacker News, or, yes, reddit account." To which the nerds of Reddit appear to have replied: No. According to the Reddit reaction of the message, a plea for giving up the sexism once again appears to have failed under the guise of free speech. "I used to respect this dude..." writes one poster. Another says: "Well that was embarrassing. Is it OK if I call you a stupid cunt, Alexis? Because you sure looked like one in that article."