Reddit's 2018 Quarantine Policy Revamp and Backlash

In late September 2018 Reddit announced a revamp of its quarantine function via a post on r/announcements by the admin account u/landoflobsters. The reworked policy codified a middle tier between leaving a community untouched and banning it: a quarantined subreddit still existed, but visitors were forced through an interstitial warning and had to explicitly opt in. Quarantined communities were removed from the front page and r/all, excluded from search and recommendations, generated no ad revenue, and had subscriber counts hidden. Reddit framed the tier as targeting communities dedicated to racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, hoaxes, or extreme gore that had ignored repeated warnings.

The rollout's scale was controversial. On the day of the announcement Reddit quarantined r/TheRedPill and r/Braincels, and within days the action swept up more than 20 controversial subreddits — among them r/CringeAnarchy (over 400,000 subscribers), r/WatchPeopleDie, r/911truth, and r/FULLCOMMUNISM.

The response was sharp. Moderators of r/TheRedPill argued that quarantining them meant 'Reddit has tacitly endorsed male abuse,' and several quarantined communities organized migration to external forums; r/CringeAnarchy ultimately decamped to a standalone site before being banned outright in 2019. A recurring objection was why comparably controversial communities — most prominently r/The_Donald — were spared in this wave, with many speculating Reddit feared the political backlash of touching them, a perception of selective enforcement that dogged the company until r/The_Donald was itself quarantined in June 2019.

Researchers later treated the 2018 revamp as a natural experiment. Studies published in Internet Policy Review (2020) and ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (2022) found mixed results: quarantines roughly halved activity and new-user influx in communities such as r/TheRedPill and r/Braincels, but did not reduce the density of hateful or toxic language among the users who remained — the intervention shrank these communities without detoxifying them, an empirical finding that complicated Reddit's stated rationale of pressuring members toward reform.