When I asked her about this, she showed me this post on Stormfront, a white nationalist website encouraging members to "slap some sense" into redditors who think racism is bad. I asked her whether she thought the admins would ever do anything about this. She doesn't think so.

"They ignore the site's problems until the media gets their hands on it," she said. "All of the mods at BlackLadies, AntiRa and more have sent countless messages to the admins all but begging them to enforce their user agreement.

"I have never seen the admins enforce these rules.

"Now that the entire internet is aware of the admins maligned definition of 'free speech', they understand that just about anything goes on Reddit. You are free to harass anybody. You are free to use hate speech.

"By now they've shackled themselves and must know that if they started enforcing their own rules that the userbase would most likely revolt, leave in droves or worse."

Ides is not alone in feeling this way. I spoke to dhamster, a moderator of r/Circlebroke, a subreddit which comments on many of the offensive aspects of the reddit "hivemind".

"People upvote the things they want to hear and downvote the things that make them uncomfortable, so it's common to see defenses of racist content drown out more critical points of view in many communities," he said, adding:

"The admins don't enforce the user agreement at all."

I began to wonder whether other non-white redditors felt the same way as I did, so I went to subreddits that are specific communities for ethnic minorities. Many of them were eager to speak to me.

"It could be because everyone posts anonymously or because it's majority young white males. Whatever the reason, racism on reddit is terrible," said Jasmine*.

"r/n***ers isn't even the worst of it, it's the people who claim not to be racist while denigrating welfare queens or thugs and fetishizing Asian women.

"Whatever the reason, the racism on reddit is terrible."

A user who wished to remain anonymous said, somewhat downheartedly, that "racism isn't a big deal to the white majority on reddit. It's easy for them to say "just downvote it or ignore it", because it's not something they face every day."