What happened
On August 5, 2015, weeks after Steve Huffman returned as CEO, Reddit unveiled a revised content policy and banned a cluster of overtly racist communities, most notably r/CoonTown along with related subreddits such as r/WatchNiggersDie and r/bestofcoontown. Huffman framed the bans narrowly, saying the targeted communities existed primarily to harass others and degrade the site rather than to host genuine discussion, and stressed that Reddit's longstanding default was to permit most content that did not prevent others from using the platform.
The same announcement introduced the "quarantine" system, a middle path between leaving offensive communities fully open and banning them outright. Quarantined subreddits would be hidden from search, recommendations, and logged-out users, stripped of advertising, and accessible only to those who explicitly opted in after acknowledging a warning. The framework let Reddit distance itself and advertisers from extremely offensive material without removing it entirely, and it became a durable enforcement tool used in later years against communities ranging from conspiracy hubs to extremist forums.