"We're banning behavior, not ideas," proclaimed Reddit's most recent site policy change on Wednesday, one which purports to be a zero-tolerance edict against individual harassment, and led to the banning of five such subreddits — the most prominent of which was the 150,000 subscriber-strong r/fatpeoplehate (FPH). What Ellen Pao and the other higher-ups of Reddit seem to have forgotten was just how badly Redditors behave when they don't get what they want .

Among even the more level-headed users, these bans felt like half-measures lacking in transparency. FPH was only one of many well-publicized, controversial forums whose only purpose was the belittlement others based on creed, race, sexuality, gender, or, in this case, weight. Even Steven Williams (AKA boogie2988), a prominent vlogger who recently took on fat hatred communities, and has been repeatedly harassed by FPH, felt the bans were startlingly incomplete. It was also the only banned subreddit out of five to be mentioned by name .

Like a hydra, one awful community was cut down and many, many more grew in its place — all in the name of Reddit's favorite rallying cry: free speech. Clones such as r/fatpeoplehate2 and r/fatpersonhate cropped up in minutes, garnering followers in the tens of thousands and overwhelming Reddit's r/all feed with calls for a reinstatement of the banned subs and for interim CEO Ellen Pao's resignation. And of course, pictures of posts discussing why the overweight are odious. The community r/punchablefaces — which has since become private — was flooded with pictures of Pao, until moderators threatened to ban those who were posting them. Claims of mass "shadowbanning" abounded on r/oppression. And when the initial two FPH replacements were banned, more popped up to replace them. At the time of this writing, r/fatpeoplehate2 through 5, 8 through 13 and 20 are banned; 6 and 14 through 19 are active with a total userbase of 3,504. r/fatpeoplehate7 now redirects to a board about the Russian armed forces.​



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Many felt that Reddit's decision had less to do with expunging harmful communities than it did with advertising revenue. Acrowsmurder, one of the creators of the replacement r/fatpersonhate, stated via private message, "I created it for a goof, not thinking anything would come of it. But now…. I believe reddit shouldn't be able to pick an choose which subs to get rid of [sic]. If a rule is made, it should apply to EVERYONE, not just the subs who are hurting their bottom line."

While the post detailing the site changes claims to give users the power to report instances of harassment, users have a right to feel concerned about a lack of transparent discourse between staff and users. After a previous site change banning what they refer to as "involuntary pornography" (and what most people would call revenge porn), my attempts to report offending forums were not replied to either in modmail or at the website's main contact email: [email protected] Interactions like this betray the fundamental lack of concern Reddit's site mods have for their users, who, presumably, would be the ones reporting any harassment they see or experience on the site.

One of the most vocal communities against the bans is r/KotakuinAction (KiA): "the reddit 'hub' for the gamergate movement," as one of their moderators StrawRedditor puts it. Although the mods of KiA claim to remove harmful posts and keep the subreddit within the rules of Reddit, KiA have come under fire for ties to anti-feminist communities, and their overt association with GamerGate, which has a reputation for harassment, doxxing as well as rape and/or death threats. As 23-year-old Alex Baldwin, a journalism student and mod of KiA, stated via email, "Redditors see this ban as a precedence [sic] to ban other subs that have been deemed 'problematic.' /r/fatpeoplehate had received a negative reputation in the media, so Redditors are wondering which sub will be next. Places like /r/MensRights, /r/TumblrInAction, and /r/KotakuInAction have been negatively portrayed in the media, so there's a bit of panic as to whether or not they're next on the chopping block."

That's when the migration happened.



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No sooner had Pao posted the new site rules did users suggest "Reddit alternatives" — the most of popular of which are Voat.Co and 8Chan.



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8Chan is the unaffiliated younger brother of 4Chan, which came to prominence after 4Chan banned GamerGate from their boards. The moderation is lax at best. Its foremost commitment is to free speech, which has earned it a reputation as a dumping ground for pedophilic content and involvement in swatting attempts. As of this writing, its newly-minted /fatpeoplehate/ board is the seventh most popular on the site.

In the same vein, Voat is very much a clone of Reddit , sharing nearly every design element and user action. Changes are largely nomenclatural, such as individual communities being called "verses" instead of subreddits. Voat began as a hobby project by a free speech- and privacy-minded college student named Atif Colo. In an email, Colo described the creation of Voat as his reaction to being unable to wipe his personal data when deleting his Reddit account.

Naturally, his digital footprint is quite small, excepting a semi-private Facebook page and some references to an iOS trivia game he may have developed, called Sleyp, which no longer seems available in the app store. All content on Voat will stay up if it's legal in Switzerland, "regardless of how distasteful or inaproppriate [sic] people may find the content to be," he wrote in an email. Voat's v/fatpeoplehate now has just over 2,000 subscribers, a far cry from the original subreddit 150,000.

The evening of Reddit's FPH ban, Voat's Alexa rank jumped up over 40,000 places. Among the top five searches that directed users to Colo's site were "kotakuinaction" and "thefappening." The latter is another controversial (and currently banned) subreddit where users would seek to find and then post personal, and usually nude, photos of celebrities — a phenomenon which began on 4Chan.



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A mass exodus might have been possible Wednesday night — for better or for worse. However, the infrastructure supporting Voat was simply not built to handle the traffic it was receiving from disgruntled Redditors. Voat went from slow to unresponsive, and stayed unusable for the better part of Thursday. Attempting to make an account early Wednesday evening took nearly five minutes, PMs would time-out before they could send, and most pages returned a 503 error.



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To complicate matters, Colo was initially unaware of the deluge of traffic his site was receiving — having just graduated from college the week before, he was in the middle of a well-earned vacation to see his parents. "We did not expect anything like this to happen," he said via email, "and now we'll have to freeze all work relating to development of new features and instead focus on scalability. It is a nice problem to have indeed but I wish we got a few more months." In all likelihood, Voat's infrastructure will accommodate this angry mob right around the time they calm down.

As for 8Chan, even with their version of FPH being relatively popular, the site contains only about 2500 posts and its active user count is a fraction of other boards /v/ (video games) and /pol/ (politically incorrect). The stickied thread for "Regrouping, Organization and Planning" has failed to come up with any meaningful ways to recreate the community and even the 8Chan FPH contingent admits that their membership only stands until "Voat can get its potatoes in order." One poster noted, "It really sucks that the subreddit and its users are decentralized, but there has to be consensus one a single location, or else there will be a lot of splinter groups [sic]."

Which is precisely what's happening.



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Across multiple (soon-to-be-banned) subbreddits — 8Chan, the barely-functioning Voat and fph.io, which many of the old moderators of FPH allegedly created — these cells of small, angry and quickly-dwindling groups not only pale in comparison to the size of the original community, but have nothing justifying their continued existence other than ire at Reddit's growing pains. Many who sought free speech (or the illusion thereof) without consideration for the quality of what was being said will likely realize they no longer enjoy the company they keep. Those who do leave permanently may hopefully realize they are a vocal minority, rather than the voice of "The Frontpage Of The Internet."

What seems to be lost in this discussion of free speech is that, like it or not, Reddit — or any discussion platform on the Internet — is well within its rights to censor or ban anything they see fit. Whether it's for the prospect of monetary gain, to create a more welcoming space for new users or to soften their image in the public eye is utterly immaterial. Although some banned communities have, in the past, been able to regroup on Reddit and continue doing whatever odious thing it is they initially set out to do, the amount of attention the FPH bans caused is likely to make regrouping impossible. As Baldwin put it, "If Reddit can't keep a community off their site, they look incompetent."