Loading…
Search issues, trackers, people, glossary, and more
The archive
Every documented issue, searchable and filterable by category, year, and keyword. Toggle between grid and timeline views, and export the filtered set to CSV.
343 issues
r/CryptoMoonShots, a subreddit dedicated to surfacing tiny new tokens, became a recurring funnel for rug pulls and 'honeypot' contracts — including the notorious SQUID token — where promoters used bot-driven engagement to lend fake credibility.
Created in September 2020 and named after a Republican figure who died of COVID-19, r/HermanCainAward grew to hundreds of thousands of members documenting people who publicly dismissed vaccines or masks and then died of the disease — a viral phenomenon that forced a public debate over pandemic misinformation, grief and online shaming.
Reddit's amateur-detective culture, centered on subreddits such as r/RBI ('Reddit Bureau of Investigation'), has been studied and criticized for crowd-sourced 'websleuthing' that can misidentify innocent people and degrade real investigations — a pattern documented in peer-reviewed research and journalism beyond the well-known Boston Marathon case.
In late January 2021 a Reddit community called r/SatoshiStreetBets openly organized a 'coordinated' buy-in that drove Dogecoin up more than 800% in a day, in a dynamic regulators and academics described as a textbook pump-and-dump.
r/Sino, a heavily pro-Chinese-Communist-Party community, became a long-running flashpoint over CCP-aligned content, denial of Uyghur persecution, and aggressive moderation, while Reddit declined to ban it.
After moderator u/pinkcatsonacid publicly raised concerns about newer r/Superstonk moderators, the subreddit's lead moderators stripped her of her position and banned her, triggering mass resignations and the migration of tens of thousands of GameStop 'apes' to the breakaway community r/GMEJungle.
At the height of the January 2021 GameStop frenzy, Discord banned the official WallStreetBets server for hate speech and the subreddit briefly went private, amid accusations that some moderators were trying to cash in on the community's sudden fame.
In August 2020 attackers hijacked moderator accounts to deface more than 70 subreddits — including r/space, r/NFL, and r/food — with pro-Trump messaging. Reddit confirmed that none of the compromised accounts had two-factor authentication enabled.
In June 2020, amid the George Floyd protests and mounting criticism of Reddit's tolerance of hate, co-founder Alexis Ohanian resigned from the board and urged the company to fill his seat with a Black candidate — a move that produced Reddit's first Black board member and previewed the platform's broader racial reckoning.
In 2018 Dylan Jarrell of Kentucky used an anonymous Reddit account to post statements signaling a planned school shooting; he was stopped while equipped to carry one out, pleaded guilty to federal charges in 2019, and was sentenced to 120 months in July 2020.
Robert Allam, known as GallowBoob, became one of Reddit's highest-karma users and a moderator of dozens of large subreddits, drawing accusations of mass self-promotion and karma farming before a viral 'power mod' list triggered harassment and his eventual withdrawal from the platform.
After r/Screenwriting users called certain screenwriting competitions scams, the contests' operator sued the subreddit's volunteer moderator and 50+ unnamed users for defamation; the moderator was dismissed under Section 230.