[mikepurvis]

Indeed, and that was also the period where Reddit happily hosted a whole bunch of extremely tasteless and borderline illegal communities centered around things like pictures of overweight people and sexualized children.

A quick googling suggests that the first wave of closures was in 2015 [1] after a crushing wave of negative publicity and advertiser pullouts. The other really high-profile one was r/The_Donald, which wasn't closed until 2020 and even has its own Wikipedia article. [2]

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/06...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald

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EDIT: Actually, looks like r/jailbait was closed much earlier, in 2011, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...

But certainly prior to June 2015, there was much, much broader tolerance for racist, sexist, transphobic content on the site.

[ajsnigrutin]

> But certainly prior to June 2015, there was much, much broader tolerance for racist, sexist, transphobic content on the site.

And now it has moved to other, more hidden platforms, where there is noone to write counterarguments, and sometimes (tor, freenet,...) impossible to identify someone who writes actual threats and not just "yo momma so fat..." jokes.

[mikepurvis]

I mean, that's literally what most of the posts are arguing for in this thread— that this needs to be a watershed moment to get serious about distributed, uncensorable alternatives to products like Google Drive.

But in any case, "people will find alternatives" has never been a valid reason not to act (either here or in other popular cases such as guns/suicide). There is real value in having standards of conduct that go above and beyond the bare minimum of "not illegal." Moral and ethical value, of course, but also economic— in the reddit case, ultimately being a place that was viable for ad spends by mainline brands who wouldn't want to be associated with a site whose public image was that of being a safe space for hate speech.

Google is a little different since there's no r/all page for GDrive that can be gamed to show this content, and nor is Google likely as worried about the safety of its reputation as an advertiser.