[mindslight]

The conflict is that reddit originally touted itself as a meta-community, where such moderation was applied per-subreddit. If you didn't like the topics/policies of one community, then start another right alongside.

But the desire of investors for widespread palatability and the media's latest push for censorship have perverted the site into creating unified "community standards", across what should be considered independent communities.

Reddit itself gained much of its popularity due to the mass exodus from Digg over their censorship of one simple number! Users inherently do not want to be censored in what they can communicate about, and so the cycle will be with us until we finally scrap this hack of using centralized websites in lieu of end-user software - centralized structures can never remain free of top-down control.

[s73v3r_]

The other problem is that several subreddits were known to "leak," where the subscribers to some subreddits would go out and spread that kind of thing across the rest of the site. If the racist content stays in their subreddits, it's still terrible that it's there, but at least it can be firewalled off. But when the users of those subreddits start spreading that content through the rest of the site, it's much more difficult to avoid it.