In July, newly appointed Reddit CEO Steve Huffman tried striking a balance between maintaining the community site's free-speech aspirations and toning down "offensive" content by "reclassifying" its most controversial "subreddit" communities. Certain subreddits that didn't necessarily break the site's content policy, particularly ones that revolved around racism, would be placed behind a consent and e-mail verification gate, removed from public search results, and disconnected from the site's ad sales.

On Wednesday, that general stance remained in place, only now with a new content policy that subreddits can be banned for violating. As a result, Huffman took to the official Announcements subreddit to share that updated policy while confirming that a slew of subreddits, particularly ones with racists slurs, had been banned as a result.

Huffman confirmed in a follow-up comment that subreddits such as "CoonTown" had been banned because they "exist[ed] solely to annoy other redditors, prevent us from improving Reddit, and generally make Reddit worse for everyone else." That phrase does not currently exist in Reddit's content policy page, but other similarly broad conditions do, including only offering "some guidelines" for what's not acceptable and a warning that "looking for loopholes is a waste of time."

The prior use of "reclassifying" subreddits has now been officially described as "quarantining," and it effectively works the same way that Huffman described the cordoning-off of offensive subreddits in July. When asked by a user whether such e-mail verification was being used by Reddit to "create a database of users who read content you deem 'questionable,'" Huffman replied that the decision was meant solely to "add friction to the signup process, which we hope will cause people to think twice before opting in."

(As a weird aside, Huffman also took the opportunity to confirm that the company's internal styleguide had been updated as well, meaning he and the rest of the staff would now capitalize the R in the company's name. Cofounder Alexis Ohanian confirmed that the logo's lowercase R would persist.)

Visitors to today's banned subreddits didn't take long to flock to competing Reddit-like platform Voat, and one of those cloned communities has gone so far as to add a Confederate flag design to users' mouse pointers—but rest assured, fancy subreddit moderators, that doesn't mean Reddit has banned the use of CSS tags to enable custom mouse pointers.