[eridius]

Fair point. Let me qualify that: From the perspective of anyone who is not afflicted with John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory[1], this is unambiguously a great move.

Sadly, there's a very vocal set of reddittors who have the worst case of the GIFT I've ever seen. These are the same people who think that it's perfectly ok to wage sustained campaigns of harassment against other people, who think it's quite alright to post vile, incredibly hurtful things to r/fatpeoplehate and r/shitniggerssay (or whatever it was called) and many other subreddits devoted to hatred, and who think that an appropriate response to a few subreddits getting banned is to start publicly labelling Ellen Pao with every single gendered, misogynistic insult they can think of (while claiming that, no, they're not sexist or misogynist, no sir no way).

[1] http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/

[kristofferR]

I disagree again. You don't have to be a douchebag that posts vile things to believe that the free speech slippery slope argument may be merited.

It's relatively easy to either only remove illegal content or to have very strict moderation (ala Facebook). It's much harder to only remove certain kinds of "offensive material" without removing too much.

[eridius]

But the banned subreddits had nothing to do with the content on them. This was not even remotely about "offensive material". This was purely about the subreddits engaging in campaigns of harassment against other people. That's not a free speech issue in the slightest. There's no slippery slope here. The only people who should be upset about this are either people who don't understand what happened (which seems to apply to you), or people who think they are entitled to harass other people online without being punished (which is, sadly, a very large number of people on Reddit).

[renata]

Then why did replacement subreddits with explicit rules against harassment and measures to prevent it get banned?

[eridius]

This is the first I've heard of there being explicit rules and measures on the replacement subs. My understanding is that they were banned because they represented an attempt at ban evasion (which is itself a serious violation of reddit policy and always has been), but I admit I haven't done much research on the replacement subs because I didn't think it was particularly important.