Horrified members of r/badhistory began to spread the word, prompting a flurry of messages to the Reddit administration protesting the takeover. But to no avail. The silence from Reddit's owners was deafening. r/Holocaust remained in neo-Nazi hands.

Faced with no official assistance, ordinary Redditors began to get organized in r/badhistory. They wanted to confront the Holocaust deniers head on, banding together to leave no bad history unanswered at the source. All misinformation would be met with clear evidence to the contrary.

But that too was doomed to failure.

It was no good simply going into the relevant subreddits and arguing each point. Moderators have the ability to simply delete such counter-points, and ban users from their forum. That's precisely what those in charge of r/Holocaust did.

With no way now of challenging the views of Nazi apologists, in Reddit's primary repository of Holocaust education, it would have been easy to admit defeat. Outraged Redditors could have ineffectively ranted in other subreddits, with like-minded people tutting that it was indeed terrible, but all agreeing that they'd done all that they could.

But they didn't. They provided alternative sources of information with probably Reddit's biggest ever explosion of new forums opening on a single topic. Overnight, dozens of Holocaust related subreddits were created, utilizing every keyword that the activists could conceive.

Moreover, they put in claims for extant subreddits, wherein the moderators had been inactive for some time. Many of those were known Holocaust deniers, who discovered the initiative only when they were asked to defend their tenancy during a takeover bid. The loss risked not because of their views, but their long-term absence.

Reddit runs on activity, regardless of its nature, and this was the chink in the armor which Holocaust truth activists exploited to the utmost. In this way coups were staged, and real historical information about the Holocaust began to be disseminated again.