[LesZedCB]

That's correct. And as the reddit execs et. al. have stated, it's not that such communities, whether based around fundamentally hateful memes or not, can exist on reddit. In fact, many morally/ethically reprehensible communities have been explicitly allowed to continue existing. However, when they start moving outside of their communities and harass other communities through vote brigading or doxxing or PMing hateful messages, then it breaches a line (or smudged line) that allows reddit admins to take action.

[Karunamon]

I'd believe that if the behavior of the administrators were consistent with that explanation.

Example, the ban you're talking about, communities which had the same idea, with different staff, that had existed before that one had, were also caught up in the ban. In other words, they were banned despite not breaking any stated rules.

Another example: A racist subreddit, not getting banned because of harassment, not for breaking rules, but because they were a frequent target of admin attention.

Another another example: Colluding with the governments of other non-US countries to censor content at those governments' request.

It's their website, they can run it as they please, but I wish Ohanian and Huffman would stop playing lip service to "free speech" and "open discussion" (something that up until recently, they did loudly and often) if that's not the goal they intend to live by. Actions speak a lot louder than words.

[linkydinkandyou]

Exactly. People are saying that /r/fatpeoplehate "violated copyright" but every meme does that. (See https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/09...). And reddit never said they were getting legal takedown notices for material published there.

Most of the posts I saw were responses to fat-acceptance bloggers and their postings on their blogs. Obviously these blogs were created to foster discussion and that was happening. When the discussion wasn't positive, they got upset.

Obviously, it's a private website and they can do what they want with it. But it never was a place for "free speech." If you didn't go along with Reddit groupthink (which is an odd mix of socialism "college should be free" "Koch Brothers are Evil" and libertarianism "Go Uber!" "Open Access to the Internet") you would be quickly down voted away.

[linkydinkandyou]

I'm not so sure that /r/fatpeoplehate did anything worse than any other "funny pictures" subreddit. (For example, ones about "rednecks" or "ravers") I think just a lot of obese people got offended, and for some reason Ellen Pao felt for them.

[amyjess]

I've seen their page before the sub was banned. Half the posts fell into one of two categories:

- Creepshots of people taken and published without the subject's permission in order to harass them.

- Pictures taken from people's friends-only Facebook albums stolen and published on Reddit for harassment purposes in violation of the privacy settings chosen by the original uploader.

Both are harassment, and the latter is a gratuitous copyright violation. The former probably also falls afoul of laws against using people's likenesses without permission.

Oh, and once imgur began removing their images for TOS violations, they began acting like a pack of wild monkeys flinging their feces: they began targeting individual imgur staff members for harassment, and multiple people began inciting DDoS attacks against imgur.

Reddit admins have been cracking down on witch hunts for quite some time, and DDoS attacks are highly illegal.

They dug their own graves and deserved to be banned.

[makomk]

They also reposted images from other subreddits, causing hordes of FPH regulars to find the original post and spam the poster with PMs telling them how much FPH hated them and how awful they were. Some of the posts even pointed people at the right subreddit, with the knowledge and complicity of the FPH moderators. We know this because at least one person who was on the receiving end of this complained to the mods, and they responded by posting another post drawing more attention to the original one and posting her photo in the subreddit sidebar. She later posted on r/suicidewatch saying she was thinking of killing herself, and FPH regulars piled into that with some nasty comments too. It got to the point that some subreddits started discouraging people - especially women - from posting selfies solely because they kept getting posted on FPH.

[amyjess]

Yep, and I believe this is what caused /r/BadFattyNoDonut to get banned after it was allowed to exist for about a month after FPH was banned. They loved to play innocent and say "oh, we're not FPH, we don't harass people", and it only took a month for them to get caught in that lie.

[e6427]

I call BS on DDOS-ing imgur. There was no organization going around to DDOS them or anyone at the time of imgur purging fatpeoplehate content from their front page galleries. Additionally, FPH was still using imgur even until their subreddit was banned as slimgr was still very early in development. 14/25 Top page links were to imgur at the time of the ban.

Also the reddit user "harassment" wasn't in one direction. Plenty of FPH members got hate PM's and 0-reason bans to other subreddits for their participation at fatpeoplehate, regardless of what content they have posted or commented.

[eertami]

@amyjess >they began acting like a pack of wild monkeys flinging their feces: they began targeting individual [...] members for harassment, and multiple people began inciting DDoS attacks

If you were to start banning subreddits based on this behavior you'd be banning pretty much every single meta sub on the site, SRD, SRS - they'd all have to go under such a policy.