Reddit's new CEO may be shaking things up with promises of new rules and a controversial content policy, but one of the site's most infamous communities is celebrating the new rules.
"/r/coontown," a subreddit notorious for promoting racism, is celebrating after CEO Steve Huffman's AMA in which he said the subreddit was not one that would be banned from the site under the new rules.
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During his first AMA on the site's new content policy, the CEO said /r/coontown would be "reclassified" as "it does not violate our current rules for banning." Reddit, he explained, would take a similar approach as the way it handles adult content on the site, which users must opt-into in order to see.
Similar to NSFW, another type of content that is difficult to define, but you know it when you see it, is the content that violates a common sense of decency. This classification will require a login, must be opted into, will not appear in search results or public listings, and will generate no revenue for Reddit.
"We believe there is value in letting all views exist, even if we find some of them abhorrent, as long as they don’t pollute people’s enjoyment of the site," Huffman wrote. "Separation and opt-in techniques have worked well for keeping adult content out of the common Redditor’s listings, and we think it’ll work for this other type of content as well."
Meanwhile, members of the subreddit -- it has more than 18,000, according to the stats on its page -- were quick to celebrate the news as many had believed the community would be banned as other offensive subreddits have been in recent weeks. The header image for the page was changed to the image below, with a gold "Reddit seal of approval," as the page quickly filled up with posts from users happy about the news.
Other critics were quick to poke holes in Huffman's reasoning and the new policy.
new reddit rules to ensure that you are *intentionally* racist, instead of just accidentally tripping over a pile of bigotry— look around you (@AaronM) July 16, 2015
Reddit SO BADLY wants to be the place where violent racism lives online that they're focusing on feature development to make it more tenable— evan (@evanplus) July 16, 2015
I’m a violent white supremacist with an infinite well of racist feelings, but this checkbox on http://t.co/Y86WDE6TMP has deterred me— Sam Biddle (@samfbiddle) July 16, 2015
Reddit has chosen free speech idealism over removing festering cesspools of racism. a victory for high school libertarians everywhere.— rumnogg (@rumnogg) July 16, 2015
HAHA wait. reddit’s creating secret, hard-to-find cabals for hate groups… so digitizing systemic racism basically pic.twitter.com/XF17v90vyZ— kyle wagner (@kylenw) July 16, 2015