Issues Database

In 2012 Reddit banned the account SolInvictus — operated by Ian Miles Cheong — after the Daily Dot reported he used his moderator positions on some of Reddit's largest subreddits to push links from sites that paid him, including GlobalPost, which confirmed it had hired him as a paid 'social media consultant.'

In June 2012 Reddit's anti-spam crackdown banned entire mainstream-publisher domains — The Atlantic, Businessweek, PhysOrg, GlobalPost, and Discovery News — and swept up Andrew Sorcini, the ex-Digg power user once dubbed 'the king of all social media.'

On 18 January 2012, Reddit went dark for twelve hours to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT IP Act, helping catalyze the largest coordinated online protest in history and contributing to both bills being shelved.

After Gawker journalist Adrian Chen unmasked the moderator 'Violentacrez,' volunteer moderators of several large subreddits — including r/politics — retaliated by banning all links to Gawker Media sites, exposing the tension between Reddit's anti-doxxing norms and press accountability.

Gawker's Adrian Chen identified Reddit's most notorious moderator, 'Violentacrez', as a 49-year-old Texas programmer — igniting a fierce debate over anonymity, doxxing, and moderator power.

CEO Yishan Wong formalized a sweeping 'we stand for free speech' policy in the wake of the Gawker outing of moderator 'Violentacrez,' setting a content-permissiveness stance that defined and dogged Reddit for years.

r/CreepShots hosted secretly-taken sexualized photos of women and girls in public without their consent. After a Georgia teacher case and Gawker's October 2012 unmasking of moderator 'Violentacrez' (Michael Brutsch), the subreddit was shut down.

In one August 2011 fortnight, the moderators of rage-comic hub r/F7U12 deliberately wrecked their own quarter-million-subscriber community, and the creator of r/IAmA threatened to shut down Reddit's flagship Q&A forum — early proof that Reddit's most valuable spaces were autocracies run by unaccountable volunteers.

In October 2011 Reddit closed r/reddit.com, the site's original catch-all community, and expanded its curated default subreddits to twenty—an under-recognized governance shift that put admins in charge of what the front page, and Reddit's culture, would become.

For roughly three years Reddit hosted r/jailbait, a community trading sexualized images of underage girls, before public pressure forced its closure in October 2011.

In early 2010 Reddit erupted over 'Saydrah', a prominent moderator revealed to work for a content company while moderating communities her employer's material could appear in — an early reckoning over undisclosed conflicts of interest and power-user influence.