A Brief History of Reddit Banning Its Own Communities
Reddit has banned entire communities several times over, sometimes for genuinely indefensible content, sometimes in ways that left a lot of ordinary users caught in the blast radius with no individual review. Here’s the actual timeline.
2015: r/fatpeoplehate and Reddit’s first harassment policy
Under then-CEO Ellen Pao, Reddit banned r/fatpeoplehate and several similar communities in June 2015, introducing its first real anti-harassment policy as the basis for the removals. A later academic study found the bans measurably reduced hate speech from users who’d posted in those communities, rather than just displacing it elsewhere on the site. The policy was also the beginning of Reddit publicly deciding, community by community, what speech it would tolerate, a line-drawing exercise that hasn’t stopped since.
The same year, the firing of popular Reddit employee Victoria Taylor (who ran the site’s AMA program) set off a separate moderator revolt that briefly took major default subreddits dark, an early preview of the leverage (and its limits) that volunteer mods actually have.
2019–2020: The_Donald, quarantined then banned
Reddit quarantined r/The_Donald in June 2019, citing threats of violence against police and public officials posted in the community. Quarantine restricted the subreddit’s visibility but didn’t remove it. A year later, in June 2020, Reddit banned r/The_Donald outright (a community with nearly 800,000 subscribers) as part of a broader policy update.
That same day, Reddit banned roughly 2,000 communities in total, including the left-wing forum r/ChapoTrapHouse (more than 150,000 subscribers), under an updated content policy explicitly targeting hate speech. Reddit said most of the 2,000 were inactive; roughly 200 had more than ten daily users at the time they were banned, meaning the wave caught small, low-traffic communities in the same sweep as the two headline bans.
What the pattern actually shows
None of this is an argument that Reddit should host communities built around harassment or violent rhetoric. It shouldn’t, and didn’t. The pattern worth noticing is different: Reddit’s content policy has changed several times, materially, and each change has been applied retroactively to communities that existed under the old rules. A subreddit (or a user in it) can be in good standing one policy revision and gone the next, with the decision made unilaterally and non-negotiably by Reddit, not by any process the affected users had a vote in.
Sources: Newsweek · CBS News SF · NPR, June 2019 · NPR, June 2020 · BuzzFeed News