Mostly, everything will be the same, except that some “subreddit” communities will be “quarantined” away, meaning that their content will be totally invisible to the ordinary Reddit user unless they specifically opt in to see it.
There was one surprise, though: Huffman announced that “CoonTown,” probably Reddit’s most notorious racist community, was officially banned from the site, as of Wednesday — a reversal from his original position that it would stay on Reddit, merely quarantined away.
“Today, in addition to applying Quarantines, we are banning a handful of communities that exist solely to annoy other redditors, prevent us from improving Reddit, and generally make Reddit worse for everyone else,” Huffman wrote in a post announcing the changes.
Other banned subreddits include a bunch of “CoonTown” affiliate communities, at least one of which has a name not worth repeating here. Another banned subreddit dealt with “animated CP,” or child pornography.
When Huffman first proposed his content policies, the “CoonTown” community celebrated what it took as an implicit vote of support from Reddit’s leadership.
Huffman says that it wasn’t the racist content that earned these communities a ban. It was the fact that its mere existence made hiring crucial talent a lot harder.
“We didn’t ban them for being racist. We banned them because we have to spend a disproportionate amount of time dealing with them. If we want to improve Reddit, we need more people, but CT’s existence and popularity has also made recruiting here more difficult,” Huffman wrote in a comment.
Since that original content-policy proposal, Reddit has had something of a brain drain, with plenty of talent leaving the company. In the meanwhile, Reddit’s traffic is surging to all-time highs.
This article was originally published on Business Insider. Copyright 2015.
