Inside Reddit as it rolled out the October 2017 policy update that resulted in the ban of numerous subreddits, including ones for Nazis and bestiality
Andrew Marantz / New Yorker :
Context & Ripple Effects
Andrew Marantz's New Yorker piece is a retrospective on the moment Reddit stopped treating its communities as untouchable: the October 2017 policy update banning content that encourages violence, which took down Nazi and white supremacist subreddits alongside bestiality forums with user counts from 25 to 7,000.
It was not the first purge — Reddit had already tested the waters with the 2015 harassment rules that killed 'Fat People Hate' — but the 2017 update hardened the template that later produced the 2020 ban of r/The_Donald, r/ChapoTrapHouse, and roughly 2,000 other subreddits. The article matters because it documents how that enforcement machinery actually got built.
First-order effects
- Nazi, white supremacist, and bestiality subreddit operators lose their communities overnight under the new violence-incitement rule, while Reddit's admins gain precedent for policy-based takedowns rather than case-by-case judgment calls.
Second-order effects
- Banned communities migrate to less-moderated platforms, forcing Reddit to keep tightening enforcement — a cadence that by mid-2020 had produced nearly 7,000 bans since June and an 18% drop in users posting hateful content.
Third-order effects
- Moderation shifts from volunteer self-governance to centralized policy enforcement as a core product function, a structure visible in Reddit's own 2022 numbers: [[a:838573|473% more subreddits removed and 244% more accounts permanently suspended for non-consensual intimate imagery violations]].
The trend: Reddit's arc from 2015 through 2023 shows large platforms replacing hands-off community autonomy with recurring, centrally enforced content-purge cycles.