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346 issues
Reddit removed the flagship alt-right subreddit r/altright on February 1, 2017 for repeated content-policy violations, citing the doxxing of, and a 'bounty' campaign against, the man filmed punching white-nationalist Richard Spencer.
Across 2017–2018 Reddit quarantined and banned a cluster of white-nationalist subreddits — quarantining r/European in 2016 and banning it March 12, 2018, and removing r/EuropeanNationalism and similar subs in the October 25, 2017 violence-policy purge.
Reddit introduced a real-time, Facebook-style chat system in late 2017 and signaled it would eventually replace the site's long-standing private-message inbox, alarming users who relied on the threaded, asynchronous messaging Reddit had used since its early years.
In 2017 Reddit complied with Turkish government censorship orders by geo-blocking subreddits, predominantly LGBTI communities, which were withheld at source under Turkey's 'obscenity' provisions.
A subreddit that marketed itself as an uncensored news alternative was run by moderators of white-nationalist communities and grew by exploiting outrage over how other news subreddits were moderated.
In March 2017 Reddit rebuilt user profiles to resemble Facebook and Twitter — banners, follow buttons and posts made directly to a personal page — prompting fears that a community-and-voting platform was being remade into a creator-driven social network.
Tyler Barriss's fake hostage 911 call — arising from a Call of Duty wager dispute coordinated online — led police to fatally shoot uninvolved Wichita resident Andrew Finch in December 2017; Barriss was sentenced to 20 years in 2019.
After the 2017 Unite the Right rally, online crowd-sourced sleuthing wrongly identified Arkansas professor Kyle Quinn as a marcher, leading to threats and doxxing that drove him from his home — a cautionary echo of the Boston Marathon misidentifications.
Reddit's 2017 April Fools' experiment handed users a blank collaborative canvas, and within days self-organizing factions — color blocs, artwork defenders, and a black 'Void' bent on destruction — fought for control in a landmark study of online coordination.
Ahead of the FCC's 2017 net-neutrality vote, Reddit users flooded r/pics and other default communities with political call-out posts, dominating the front page and triggering a user backlash over politics on a non-political subreddit.
After acquiring the beloved third-party iOS client Alien Blue in 2014, Reddit phased it out in favor of its own rewritten official apps, pulling it from the App Store in 2016 and steering users onto a first-party client many felt was inferior.
On 27 July 2016, then-nominee Donald Trump held an 'Ask Me Anything' on the fan subreddit r/The_Donald rather than r/IAmA, and press reported he answered only about eight questions in a heavily moderated thread.