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343 issues
From 2015 to 2019 Reddit ran a series of April Fools' Day social experiments — most famously r/thebutton, a 60-second countdown timer that a million accounts could each press exactly once — which fractured users into color-coded factions that observers compared to religions and cults.
Reddit moved from tolerating 'witch hunts' to formal anti-doxxing and anti-harassment rules only after a string of high-profile misidentifications and harassment campaigns, culminating in its 2015 policy overhaul.
During the Bitcoin 'block size' war, r/Bitcoin's lead moderator 'theymos' deleted comments, banned users, and removed moderators who supported alternative software like Bitcoin XT — pushing dissenters to found the rival r/btc.
The abrupt firing of AMA coordinator Victoria Taylor triggered a revolt in which moderators of r/IAmA and more than a thousand other subreddits went private in protest.
After Reddit banned r/creepshots in 2012, the same non-consensual-photo community resurfaced thinly disguised as r/CandidFashionPolice and ran for roughly three years before being banned under Reddit's 2015 involuntary-pornography policy.
After Reddit banned r/TheFappening — which its creator called the fastest-growing subreddit in history, with more than 250 million page views in under a week — the community's unrepentant founder held an AMA, users accused Reddit of profiting before acting, and weeks later the company closed a $50m funding round that commentators branded 'peak irony.'
Bill Cosby's June 2014 Reddit AMA and a later #CosbyMeme promotion were overrun as users surfaced the decades-old sexual-assault allegations against him — an early, vivid case of a celebrity PR push on Reddit and social media colliding with the audience's own agenda.
Across multiple AMAs beginning in 2013, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates engaged at length on philanthropy, technology, and public health — sessions widely cited as a model of how the format can succeed, in contrast to the genre's many disasters.
During the GamerGate harassment campaign, Reddit communities — most prominently r/KotakuInAction — served as a major hub for coordination and amplification, as targets including Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu, and Anita Sarkeesian faced doxxing, threats, and forced evacuations from their homes.
Indonesia blocked Reddit (alongside Vimeo and Imgur) in 2014 under its 'Internet Positif' anti-pornography filtering regime, and the block has persisted for over a decade.
Reddit hosted a cluster of communities built around sharing images of women obtained without consent — including r/photoplunder, which scraped private photos from Photobucket, and r/CandidFashionPolice — curbed largely by outside legal pressure rather than Reddit policy.
In October 2014 Reddit acquired Alien Blue—the most popular unofficial iOS Reddit app, built by a single developer—and made it the company's first official mobile app, an admission that outsiders had built mobile Reddit before Reddit did.