More specific content warnings:
- Suicide
- Death / killings
- Racism, transphobia, xenophobia
- Child sex abuse
- Terrorism
There are two main forums I have on my mind that used to be subreddits:
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A suicide subreddit which generally considered it a concern of bodily autonomy, and
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A subreddit with videos of people dying.
The suicide subreddit was banned six years ago, and the death subreddit was banned five years ago.
The suicide subreddit generally had a lot of good discussion of suicide on the merits. This played a crucial role for me. I'm an annoying Facts and Logic person, and I was regularly suicidal. Therapists and whatnot are legally-bound to argue from a point of "never kill yourself", but that suicide subreddit was somewhere you could go to have a discussion about the ethics of suicide in a manner that's practical and personal to someone considering it.
The suicide subreddit wasn't really bad. But, once it got banned, the community went off site, and it transformed. The subreddit is now a forum that has effectively become a suicide wiki. People on that suicide forum will research to find new means, help others procure means, share their suicide protocols, and cross-reference other confirmed-deceased posters to find what seems effective and painless. This did not happen on the subreddit.
And the subreddit for watching people die? That was once a place that made for public documentation of warcrimes and other activities you would not see on the news. I think watching people die is very bad for your brain, but I also think there was some importance to that. When a police officer shot someone who did not deserve to be shot, that subreddit might have had the uncensored video. What was reported as an "officer involved shooting resulting in the death of an uncooperative man" might be seen to be a blatant murder.
But Reddit banned that subreddit, and a few years later, it became a separate site, as a Reddit clone. It's populated almost primarily by far-right people (something I suspected, but recently confirmed, when they started polling on who they want to win the US election.) The evidence is in the comments and titles, with huge amounts of vilification of immigrants, people of color, and trans people.
It's gotten to a point where the site is now effectively 'celebrating' its second school shooter, who was 12. (There is too much nuance to the term 'celebrating' to put here.) This did not happen on the subreddit! This has gotten to the point where, if this site is not an FBI honeypot, it will be soon.
I think this is a common trend to Reddit specifically: A community gets big on the site, it gets banned for being bad, and it moves somewhere with less moderation, and it gets worse.
There's the whole history of r/the_donald and its offshoot sites, intermingled with the voats and chans and whatnots of the world. For those unfamiliar, there was an alt-right reddit clone called "voat" which shut down after the admin had a Christ Meltdown. Then, after Reddit banned the_donald, there was an offshoot site. After being one of the forums used to plan and celebrate the Jan 6 terrorist attack, the admin denounced it, causing big far-righty drama, and it had another offshoot. It has some of the most extreme pro-Trump forums I've ever seen.
Then there's Reddit's premiere CSAM subreddit "r/jailbait" got shut down. I was a minor being groomed at the time it was shutdown, and I was very much on the outskirts of these people. Most of my grooming happened over Skype, Facebook, and SMS. This was unique because, as far as I know, Reddit had the only large community of open pedophiles sharing CSAM on the internet. My understanding is, before and after Reddit, pedophiles mostly operated in small networks of chatrooms and individual communications. (Which makes sense, given the (justifiably) caustic social/political/legal for CSAM.) It boggles my mind that nobody talks about this? One of Reddit's main attractions, for its formative years, was CSAM. Not even Facebook could get away with that.
I don't mean to imply that Reddit should take a paternal role and maintain these communities. I also don't mean to imply that these are all analogous. The only similarity is the "banned subreddit becomes worse on a new site".
There's no central thesis or call-to-action, this is just something that has weighed on my mind, as I am constantly thinking about posting and making places to post.
TLDR: Reddit has spawned communities which were bad for the site. These communities have gotten banned, and they became worse when they moved offsite. I focus on two "case studies": (1) A suicide-discussion subreddit turned how-to-kill-yourself forum, and (2) a watch-people-die subreddit turned killing-minorities-is-based forum. I think this is a larger trend, which we've seen with jailbait and the_donald as other examples. But I don't think the solution is for Reddit to try to permanently house these communities in a paternal way. And I don't think these four examples are all the same level of bad. There is no main point here, this is just on my mind.