CodeXAhex
Once upon a time, Reddit, like most of the web back in the day, had relatively few limits on speech. In fact, for a long time, the site was known for its gruesome and controversial subreddits.
Here is what one of the site's cofounders, Aaron Swartz, wrote about free speech:
The temptation to clamp down on free speech is always strong; it’s probably not a sound idea to build the principle on such a shaky foundation.
So I have my own justification for freedom of speech: because we can. Human freedom is important, so we should try to protect it from encroachment wherever possible. With most freedoms — freedom of motion, freedom of exchange, freedom of action — permitting them in full would cause some problems. People shouldn’t be free to walk into other people’s bedrooms, take all their stuff, and then punch the poor victims in the face. But hurling a bunch of epithets at the guy really isn’t so bad.
Freedom of speech is one place where we can draw the line and say: all of this is acceptable. There’s no further logic to it than that; freedom of speech is not an instrumental value. Like all freedom, it’s fundamental, and the only reason we happen to single it out is because it’s more reasonable than all of the others.
This sort of idealistic culture of freedom persisted on the site without Swartz until 2011-2012, which culminated in the anti-corporatist "occupy" movement and the pro-freedom Ron Paul 2012 campaign — Reddit (as well as 4chan) were driving these movements.
Unfortunately, Reddit eventually strayed from the principles of its founders and sought to become advetiser-friendly. After Facebook went public in 2012 and made a fuck ton of money, the long term goal of Reddit was to go public. They were obsessed with the idea. They started hiring stuffy corporate/establishment people and shoved the idealistic tech bros aside.
But the Occupy and Ron Paul 2012 movements shocked the establishment/regime to its core. They were terrified of the idea of being held accountable or having their free government/federal reserve handouts cut off. This is the exact moment when mainstream media started talking about "racism" and other cultural issues. It was an attempt to take the pressure off of them and get young idealistic people talking about something else instead.
The perfect opportunity to make the permanent shift happened in 2015 after r/The_Donald started showing up on the front page of r/all every single day. There was a massive overcorrection with a huge ban wave against "extremism" and "Nazis." This emboldened loser moderators who saw it as a green light to follow suit and go on a crusade against "Nazis" so they could feel big and powerful — exactly what the regime was hoping would happen when they planted the seeds for "racism" narratives a few years prior. The entire culture of the website was damaged permanently. To this day, only bottom-of-the-barrel regime bootlickers have managed to survive there.
Around that time, I came across a post on the transformers subreddit. It was a picture of Shockwave next to a wall with graffiti saying "trans rights are human rights" or something like that. A parody of the classic "Transformers are all dead" cover. It was massively upvoted and anybody who commented anything negative was outright banned. The striking thing was that it was before trans shit was mainstream and well before IDW put any gay shit into the comics. I knew at that point fanbases on Reddit, and really, fanbases in general, were absolutely cooked. Not even just IDW properties. Just fanbases in general.
The fall of fanbases to degeneracy, and to use a word I despise, "wokeness," was destined to happen before "woke" was even a thing. It was part of the playbook created a decade ago (which honestly has intellectual roots that go back much, much further).
