We’ve seen this story over and over.
Reddit proclaims itself to be the “front page of the Internet”. And it’s very popular. Hell, I still hang out there. There’s lots of good people and good communities there, if you know where to look.
However, Reddit has a festering cancer. There’s a number of subreddits full of racists, fascists, teenage edgelords, misogynists, homophobes, transphobes, white supremacists, and neo-nazis. The most infamous subreddit hosting these characters is /r/The_Donald. That place is a hate subreddit masquerading as a fan site for Lord Dampnut. The subreddit regularly has posts and comments that are racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and promote violence. They regularly break site rules by engaging in brigading, sockpuppeting, trolling and disrupting other subreddits, manipulating Reddit’s ranking system, abusing and harassing users, making threats, doxxing people, the list goes on. Something needs to change.
That subreddit and its regular users have been caught in the act over and over and over again. Users have brought up this behavior with moderators and Reddit admins repeatedly. And what has been done? Next to nothing.
Reddit’s CEO, Steve Huffman, aka /u/spez refuses to act in the face of all of this abuse. /u/spez seems to be unable to bring himself to do the right thing on his own recognizance.
He needs an attitude adjustment. As Darth Vader put it, perhaps we can find new ways to motivate him..
Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to give /u/spez that attitude adjustment.
How are we going to make that happen?
We fuck with his money. It seems to be the only way to light a fire under his ass.
The steps are simple:
1. Don your hazmat suit. You have been warned. We’re dealing with subreddits like r/The_Donald/. You’ll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy (this side of 4chan). Seriously, these are hives full of racists, fascists, white supremacists, red-pillers, TERFs, neo-nazis, and of course, Russian trollbots. They’re cockroaches and murderers (in some cases, literally).
2. Turn off your ad blocker. Yes, off. The whole point is to put pressure on advertisers to force Reddit’s admins to spray the place down with fungicide. So for this project, you need to see the ads.
3. Visit the worst places on Reddit, and find something that violates Reddit’s terms of service and violates common decency. Find something that is bigoted, misogynistic, promotes violence, is abusive, or is otherwise offensive. Given the places we’ll be looking, this won’t be hard. Here are some toxic subreddits for a start:
- r/The_Donald/
- r/conservative/
- r/conspiracy/
- r/uncensorednews/
- r/canada/
- r/metacanada/
- r/GenderCritical/
- r/KotakuInAction
- r/ImGoingToHellForThis/
- r/milliondollarextreme/
- r/CringeAnarchy/
4. Take a screenshot.
5. Find an advertisement on Reddit. Again, take a screenshot. It might be hard to find a post where you can screenshot both an example of toxic scumfuckery and an ad at the same time, but keep in mind that even the ads that are elsewhere on Reddit help pay to make places like r/The_Donald possible.
6. Click on the ad, find a contact link on the advertiser’s web site, and inform them what their advertising dollars are paying for. Send them the screenshots, tell them that their advertising money is helping to pay for Internet cancer. When enough people do this, and the marketing droids in these businesses see how their brands are being tarnished, the rest will take care of itself.
Oh, and for the love of FSM, DO NOT BUY REDDIT GOLD.
/u/spez is already feeling the heat from the media and from advertisers because of his insistence on allowing toxic fascist pieces of trash to slime up the site, and the Internet in general. It’s time to keep up the pressure to drive him to fumigate the place.
I will make it a goal for myself to post about once a week on this, to keep the pressure on.
/u/spez won’t do the right thing on his own. We have to make him.
FLY MY PRETTIES! FLY!!!