The 7,000 subreddits deleted since late June had approximately 365,000 daily users, but the majority of those banned subreddits (76 percent) had less than 10 subscribers. Only eight percent had more than 100 users.
Reddit’s efforts to ban hate speech may not be entirely altruistic. In early June, hundreds of moderators wrote a scathing open letter accusing leaders of allowing the site to “fester with hate in the name of ‘free speech.’” Shortly afterward, Reddit updated its rules on hate speech and banned 2,000 subreddits, including one of the most notorious pro-Trump forums, r/the_donald.
While Reddit now claims it’s committed to cleaning things up, it’s also reminding everyone how difficult that can be.
“Defining hate at scale is fraught with challenges. Sometimes hate can be very overt, other times it can be more subtle,” the company wrote in a report. In other words, “people are weirdly creative about how to be mean to each other.”
Of course, hateful content isn’t the only thing preventing Reddit from being a safe space. It also has the challenge of hackers, like those who recently defaced dozens of Reddit communities with pro-Trump messages.