'Peak irony': the r/TheFappening fallout, the creator's AMA, and Reddit's $50m round

After the leak of hundreds of nude celebrity photos online through 4chan in 2014, traffic swiftly funnelled to Reddit, where a user named johnsmcjohn set up r/TheFappening as a hub for the images. In an AMA after the ban, johnsmcjohn wrote that the community had been "the fastest growing sub of all time," with "more than 250,000,000 page views in less than a week." The banning came late on a Saturday night, after six days of huge traffic and mounting criticism that Reddit was facilitating the humiliation of Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and Kirsten Dunst, among other celebrities. This entry covers the fallout around the community and the company; the ban itself and the involuntary-pornography policy that followed are covered separately in this archive.

Reddit's explanation, posted by systems administrator Jason Harvey, described an unwinnable "game of whack-a-mole": images taken down under DMCA requests were instantly reposted, the same cycle recurred with photos believed to show underage subjects — reporting identified images of gymnast McKayla Maroney, which The Guardian noted would be classified as child pornography, and The Verge reported that pictures of Maroney and actress Liz Lee were taken before they came of age — and "nefarious parties" began spamming the popular images to infect or scam viewers. "It became obvious that we were either going to have to watch these subreddits constantly, or shut them down. We chose the latter," Harvey wrote. Around the same time, CEO Yishan Wong published a blog post titled "Every Man Is Responsible For His Own Soul" explaining why Reddit would not ban communities for being "morally bad," describing the company as "the government of a new type of community" — a juxtaposition so confusing that Reddit later apologized, admitting the community's confusion "was obvious, immediate, and massive, and we even had internal team members surprised by the combination."

The subreddit's creator emerged as a story in himself. In his AMA, johnsmcjohn insisted "I did not start the sub to be the prime place on the internet for celeb leaks" and said his moderators "worked their asses off" to keep content within Reddit's rules; he speculated that lawyers for Reddit's owner Advance Publications, parent of Condé Nast, had pushed the decision. After the Washington Post published a profile mining his posting history, he complained that his privacy had been invaded — "Why is my being on an asexuality website or an Aspergers board relevant to my work on /r/TheFappening?" — and vowed, "I won't be bullied into silence." Salon noted the irony of the man who ran a clearinghouse for stolen intimate photos objecting to scrutiny of his own online life.

The sharper irony was financial. Users accused Reddit of waiting until it had reaped huge traffic before acting, and within days of the ban, reports emerged that Reddit was set to sell 10 percent of itself for $50 million at a roughly $500 million valuation. At Gawker, one writer wondered whether the decision to ban the community — even after Wong had said the site would never ban subreddits for being "morally bad" — was made "out of concern for potential A-list Silicon Valley investors." Salon's Andrew Leonard concluded that "Reddit's debacle was a huge success": traffic so large the CEO was embarrassed to admit it publicly had only validated the company's rising valuation.

On 1 October 2014 the $50m round closed, led by Y Combinator president Sam Altman with participation from investors including Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, actor Jared Leto and hip-hop star Snoop Dogg. Wong denied any connection between the ban and the fundraising: "Fundraising cycles are much longer than nude celebrity photo cycles, and the two happened to overlap," he told VentureBeat, adding that he had given investors "a chance to back out if you want" and all stayed in. The investors proposed giving 10 percent of their shares back to Reddit's users, and Wong framed the raise as backing for the company's beliefs in "free speech, self-governing communities, and the power of voting" — a philosophy the previous month had severely tested.