Reddit will launch a new anti-troll measure as part of its ongoing efforts to improve its user experience.

The change affects negative comment karma, points accumulated each time a redditor downvotes another user's content, which will now be capped at -100 on a person’s profile page.

“This change is intended to address both the increasing amount of ‘downvote trolls’ and also hopefully help lessen the amount of crazed-mob-downvoting that happens in a situation like someone ending up on the wrong end of a really important argument about jackdaws or something,” Reddit staffer Chad Birch (Deimorz on Reddit) stated.

A "downvote troll" in this context is someone who purposefully pushes the buttons of other redditors to collect as much negative karma as possible. When those numbers are particularly large, they stand as something as a badge of honor for your average troll.

The "jackdaws" Birch mentions refers to a recent argument that amounted to minor controversy on the site. A redditor named ecka6 got into a heated debate with a popular redditor called Unidan, an ecologist known for his entertaining and highly educational comments. The spat was about which animal family crows belong in.

Thanks to Unidan's large fan following on the site, the spat resulted in ecka6’s account getting bombarded by thousands of downvotes. A day after their argument, Unidan was banned from Reddit for using five alternate accounts to downvote anyone disagreeing with him, among other things.By reducing the total amount of negative karma, this kind of mass-downvoting will now have a much more limited effect.

The new measure will also cut into novelty troll acconts, such as FabulousFerd, who thrive on collecting as much negative karma they can by leaving lousy, rude, or intentionally contrarian comments. As of Thursday, FabulousFerd had -46,583 comments. When the new change is implemented, that number will top out at -100. Other than that, nothing else regarding comment karma will be altered.

“There is no change at all to how much comments can be downvoted, no change to the scores of individual comments, and the full amount of negative karma will still be tracked internally, just not displayed,” Birch added.

In June, Reddit removed the ability to see exactly how many upvotes and downvotes a post had received. The site had originally "fuzzed" total upvote and downvote counts to discourage spammers. But this made the totals displayed completely inaccurate. That metric was replaced with a “% like it” metric. This change was panned by redditors claiming it made Reddit-powered contests useless and dumbed down the user experience.

The change in comment karma has been well received, however.

"Individual troll accounts can still gain notoriety by being prolific (‘Hey, I see your name everywhere!’)," one redditor noted. "But unlike with most karmawhores, a notorious downvote troll is a lot more likely to get banned from most of the bigger subs, so they'd end up having to retire quicker."

And unfortunately for trolls on Reddit, the site doesn't exactly offer a retirement plan.

Illustration by Max Fleishman

The lure of creating a viral video sensation is still strong in 2014. A water-cooler worthy video could land you international recognition, TV appearances, and not to mention a paycheck from ad preroll and potential brand partnerships if you're lucky enough to cross into the internet fame stratosphere. The path to such viral fame often starts with Reddit, and users are often sharing their own videos or the videos of others they find. That's all fair game, unless the video you put up is actually a skit you're trying to pass off as something unique and true to life. Thus was the issue with the "Drunk Wife Makes Grilled Cheeses" video, which Reddit swiftly debunked.

For a moment, it looked like a hilarious find. A man wakes up at 2:30am to find his drunk wife making "grilled cheeses" in the kitchen, except all she's doing is melting string cheese on Goldfish crackers and randomly removing her clothes. The man films his wife and, boom, viral sensation. The drunk cooking formual worked for YouTuber Hannah Hart, what would possibly go wrong?

In this case, it's all a fake. The "wife" in question is comedian Ashley Bez, who is not married according to the Reddit debunkers. Although this is not always the mark of a hoax, they also noted that the video was uploaded on a dummy channel with only the one video, and that the poster has been suspiciously quiet since he linked the video on Reddit.  

However, a debunking doesn't stop a video from going viral. Despite Reddit calling the video out and its comments being littered with disgrunteled truthers, the video itself accumulated more than 230,000 views in a single day. Unfortunately a viral hoax can be just as rewarding as the real thing. 

H/T Reddit | Screengrab via My Drunkwife/YouTube

The Westboro Church’s Reddit AMA (“ask me anything”) was a disaster of biblical proportions.

Members of the Topeka, Kan.-based organization, infamous for picketing veterans' funerals while holding signs reading "God Hates Fags,” hosted a Q&A session on r/IAmA Sunday as a way to promote its protest Tuesday at Reddit headquarters. The protest is specifically against the late hacker and activist Aaron Swartz whom Westboro claims was a "a fag, an atheist and a thief.”

“Westboro Baptist Church is only interested in two things: 1.) loving God & 2.) loving our neighbours,” the organization stated. “ In order to do this, we use every resource available, up to and including using Reddit itself and going to Reddit headquarters in person to preach outside to warn against the dangers of a life of unrepentant sin.”

The AMA was immediately overrun by “downvote trolls,” Reddit users who indiscriminately downvote comments no matter what is written. As such, nearly every response from WBCmembers was hidden from the public by Reddit’s algorithm.

Here’s a sampling of some of Westboro answers that were downvoted to hell.

A handful of other responses from Westboro were not only heavily upvoted, but even collected Reddit Gold, a set of features people can gift to one another for a few dollars a month.

On r/changemyview, a subreddit where people seek out opposing points of view on any given subject, redditor mugglesj argued that the way Westboro was treated on Reddit amounts to to harrassment and violates Reddiquete, the sites unofficial set of values.

“Reddit has known about the AMA, and has been hostile to the very idea. The fact that we are a big enough community to attract the attention of such a big name is very impressive,” mugglesj added. “To spoil these chances shows our immaturity, and our inability to do these sorts of things again. Don't fight hate with hate. Thats what we did, and we should be ashamed.”

Westboro will be protesting in front of Reddit’s San Francisco headquarters Tuesday at 5:35pm to 6pm. The church will also protest Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Google because they proliferate “fag propaganda."

Photo by John Lemieux (CC BY-SA 2.0) | Remix by Jason Reed

The Reddit community has helped the daughter of the late Robin Williams to raise over $9,000 for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Reddit helped Zelda Williams, 25, raise $6,700 in less than a day after her father was found dead in his California home at the age of 63.

The Academy Award-winning comedian was a longtime supporter of St. Jude’s, a nonprofit organization that provides free healthcare to children.

“St. Jude Children's Research Hospital makes sure that the families of sick kids in need never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing or food, so all they need to worry about is making sure there kid feels happy and loved,” Zelda wrote on her fundraising page.

A link to Zelda’s donation page was posted in a Robin Williams megathread on r/AskReddit. The comment was posted Monday night when the fundraiser had only collected $2,390 of its $5,000 goal. An hour after the link was up, the amount raised had doubled. By 11:45 am ET today, it had passed $9,100.

“Mr. Williams generously gave his time to raise awareness and funds for St. Jude and for our patients battling childhood cancer,” the hospital said in a statement. “His humor brought bright smiles and laughter to our patients and families and his generosity deeply touched the hearts of all who knew him. He and his family remain in our thoughts and prayers."

Photo via jurvetson/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Fernando Alfonso III

Man once lorded over animal with his opposable thumb. We gripped jar lids, prying them from their containers to enjoy their delicious contents while the lesser mammals watched with envy. We closed doors in their faces so that dogs wouldn’t watch us pee, or cats wouldn’t give us weird looks during lovemaking.

But the day of reckoning has come, for a cat named Mulder has begun the revolution by opening the door to freedom—literally. Redditor ErixTheRed posted a video, claiming that his brother’s cat has learned to open doors.

The video, is both an astounding feline feat and equally terrifying. Not even an added obstacle of a makeshift moat can deter Mulder from clawing onto that handle and busting through the doors. Like a Ninja Warrior competitor, Mulder jumps his way over, avoiding the water and  barging in on whatever activity is occurring.

Time to buy some deadbolts, for no door is safe from Mulder's ways. Let's hope he at least learns to knock soon. 

H/T Reddit | Photo via ttrimm/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0) 

The controversial moderator of Reddit’s home for the populer Internet comic xkcd has been kicked off his own subreddit.

The moderator, who went by the name “soccer” on Reddit, was a conspiracy theorist and holocaust denier who used his seniority at r/xkcd to promote subreddits like Reddit's controversial hub for men's rights.

Over his three-year tenure atop r/xkcd, soccer had banned moderators for disagreeing with him and shrugged his moderator responsibilities. He was never shy to pedal Holocaust denials, either.

In January the r/xkcd community started a petition to remove  him from the subreddit.

“He is an abusive mod,” the petition stated. “He linked to offensive and irrelevant subreddits that [xkcd creator] Randall Munroe would not want affiliated with xkcd. He censored content, promoted his own racist and sexist interests, and removed the mod who added CSS and did a great job of revitalizing the community.”

These sentiments were echoed by Munroe, who is also an early Reddit user.

“I can confirm that I absolutely would not want the kind of person who would link to r/mensrights, r/conspiracy, or r/theredpill in charge of any xkcd-related community. Ugh,” Monroe commented on Jan. 27.

Reddit staff occasionally kick out moderators from a subreddit if they've been inactive long enough and another redditor requests control. On Friday, soccer was stripped of his moderator role after two months of inactivity.

As a result, existing r/xkcd made quick work of reversing many of his controversial decisions. This included, among other things, unbanning everyone who was banned under /u/soccer (including AutoModerator shadowbans), replacing controversial sidebar links with one relevant to the comic, banning /u/soccer and all former mods under him, as well as known alts. Munroe was also added as an honororary mod.

The exit of soccer was celebrated throughout r/xkcd.

“If it turns out that the mods were forcefully removed, some were concerned that this sets some sort of ‘precedent,’ but the fact of the matter is that being reasonable is much more important,”  one user wrote. “This was such obvious bullshit and now it's over.”

Photo by adamcaudill/Flickr (CC By 2.0)

Accidents caught on dash cams are never a pretty sight. But everything has an exception.

It’s rare to have a brush with death and land on your feet. It’s even more unlikely that you’ll look cool doing it. Most ridiculous of all is the hope of having the incident filmed and GIF’d for posterity. Yet here we are, transfixed by a motorcycle maneuver that puts Michael Bay to shame.

Try not to look at anything else today—you’ll just be disappointed.

H/T Hypervocal | Photo by driver Photographer/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The gaming community has unleashed a stream of vitriol and harassment against feminist gamer Zoe Quinn thanks to a tell-all blog post made by a jilted ex-boyfriend.

Allegations made by Quinn’s ex have brought about an Internet maelstrom, a sustained campaign of harassment—again—against Quinn and her family, and widespread accusations by gamers that Quinn’s alleged personal relationships are a sign of corruption in the gaming industry.

Thing is, there are no publicly known facts to support this theory. There is, however, a lot of hot air.

On Saturday, gamer and coder Eron Gjoni, who dated Quinn during the time she created Depression Quest, detailed his alleged history as Quinn's then-boyfriend in an extensive blog post.

"[T]his is written almost entirely in shitty metaphors and bitter snark," he wrote. "It’s a post about an ex." Gjoni then goes on to allege that Quinn slept with other professionals in the gaming industry while they were dating.

Despite its length, Gjoni’s post amounts to little more than the kind of nasty, post-breakup gripes spurned partners lament about with close friends. But thanks to a number of key factors, his allegations have turned into a hot-button issue for a certain sector of the gaming community, which has twisted Gjoni’s dirty laundry into a narrative of industry corruption—a tale that is not based on provable fact.

While Gjoni does not directly accuse Quinn of using sex to advance her career, he implies that her relationships with the man for whom she later worked and a gaming journalist may have been ethically murky.

Mostly, however, Gjoni’s blog post portrays Quinn as dishonest. Gjoni ultimately concludes that Quinn was attempting to keep him from going public about her alleged indiscretions—with what seems in retrospect to have been good reason, given the number of gamers who have subsequently harassed her ever since the post went up.

All week, gamers have accused Quinn of trading sexual favors for career advancement from industry professionals and positive reviews from gaming journalists. Despite the lack of evidence for either of these claims—again, Gjoni’s post never makes either allegation, and the gaming journalist he names never reviewed Quinn’s game, Depression Quest—the idea has taken firm hold within the gaming community.

As Youtuber Triox points out in his response video, part of the reason gamers are so angry about Quinn's alleged ties to industry journalism is that many of them seem to hold industry journalism responsible for making Depression Quest unfairly popular to begin with.

Depression Quest is an award-winning text-based choose-your-own-adventure game. But while it received nearly universalpositivereviews from professional critics who praised it for immersing players in the difficult experience of depression, many gamers saw it differently.

"The few mechanics used are simple yet effective, but it's apparent Quinn has never been to a creative writing workshop," wrote one gamer in April. With its rudimentary graphics and simplistic mechanics, many gamers felt that Quinn's success was illegitimate. They agreed with Triox that Quinn's game only shot to prominence after Quinn claimed to have been harassed during the game's development. Gaming outlets rushed to publicize Quinn's allegations—she claimed to have had to change her phone number due to harassment—which helped to eventually secure Depression Quest a place on Steam.

It appears that in the eyes of these gamers, the journalists who supported Quinn or her game are somehow helping to rig the system for feminist members of the gaming community. One Escapist forum thread on the subject was entitled, "Zoe Quinn, or how video game media may have been exposed as a pro-feminist hugbox" before being renamed.

"She was supported by the gaming press and by other certain indie developers ... against these hordes of horrible, horrible trolls that were apparently trying to keep her down," stated YouTube user InternetAristocrat in a video uploaded Monday. Quinn seems to have rapidly become a symbol for gamers about the perceived hypocrisy in gaming towards women who herald concepts of social justice. On Tumblr, user alexxdz offered this comparison:

When Josh Mattingly said some awkward and innapropriate shit to a female developer everyone was talking about it, if you google his name the first page will have articles by Kotaku and Rock Paper Shotgun.

Now that some dirt about Zoe Quinn and a Kotaku staff member showed up suddenly privacy is a big deal.

Of course, there's an obvious difference. Mattingly exploited a massive gender divide between industry pros while sexually harassing a female game developer, and he did it in public on social media. Quinn's greatest sin appears to be having alleged private relationships with other men in the industry.

Another obvious difference is that while these women may get support from members of the industry and the media, they often have to endure extremeharassment from gamers simply for being women within the community. MundaneMatt’s video claimed that feminists within the gaming community were "put on pedestals," and that Quinn's relationships revealed the "incestuous" nature of the indie gaming community. He named Quinn and the much-maligned Anita Sarkeesian as examples. But Quinn and Sarkeesian could be poster children for the harassment women in the industry are forced to regularly endure. Sarkeesian especially is an example of a feminist within the community who has endured an intense amount of backlash from the gaming community, including death threats and real-life harassment, because of her work.

Trolling, sustained campaigns of harassment, intense vitriol, and a rhetoric on the part of the harassers of being conspired against by mainstream media—these are all familiar parts of the misogyny that various women in the gaming community have endured in recent years. From the sidelines, it's hard to see that the current controversy over Quinn is any different from the previous controversies that have hounded women who attempt to maneuver within the culture.

Adding to the chaos is that Quinn allegedly tried to suppress some of the responses about her private life from being made public. Quinn allegedly issued a copyright claim against a video made by a YouTuber named MundaneMatt; however, mirrored copies of it are making the rounds. Another website, Games Nosh, was temporarily taken offline altogether after its domain host asked it to take down a blog post, screengrabbed here, about the Quinn scandal:

Host wants us to remove the article. Seeing if we can find a workaround to satisfy them.

— GamesNosh (@GamesNosh) August 19, 2014

Though the site the site is now back online, Quinn's supporters have done her no favors by attempting to suppress the conversation around her sexual exploits.  

Many male gamers viewed Quinn's alleged takedowns as continuing her alleged pattern of suppressing information about her private sexual activities in order to boost her career.

But even Quinn's own alleged use of copyright to have content taken offline is itself a tactic that redditors and other gamers themselves used to briefly silence Anita Sarkeesian—a tactic seen as useful, rather than deplorable, when it was in the hands of angry male gamers instead of women who challenged them.

And the gamers are angry. 4Chan's /v/ imageboard allegedly briefly hacked Quinn's Tumblr in an attempt to get her real-life contact details, along with stealing alleged nude photos of Quinn from a private server. They've also flocked to Metacritic to bombard her game with negative reviews. (Reviews for the game are currently removed from Steam.)

In a Tumblr post, originally deleted during the hack and then reposted, Quinn detailed the litany of harassment she and her relatives had been subjected to as a result of the latest wave of harassment. After asking that members of the gaming press "be respectful of what IS a personal matter, and not news," she elaborated:

The idea that I am required to debunk a manifesto of my sexual past written by an openly malicious ex-boyfriend in order to continue participating in this industry is horrifying, and I won’t do it. It’s a personal matter that never should have been made public, and I don’t want to delve into personal shit, mine or anyone else’s, while saying that people’s love and sex lives are no one’s business. I’m not going to talk about it. I will never talk about it. It is not your goddamned business.

....

This is another example of gendered violence, whereby my personal life becomes a means to punish my professional credentials and to try to shame me into giving up my work. I’m still committed to doing my small part to create a world where no woman is at risk of experiencing this. That said, I am thankful that even boards with a reputation for being the most hostile places online have been able to tell the intent behind these threads and banned them outright, seeing the hate speech for what it is, and not-news for what it is. 

Among the "boards with a reputation" to which Quinn refers are 4chan's /r9k/ board and Reddit, both of which have seen moderators deleting threads devoted to doxing Quinn's information, in some cases incorrectly. Reddit has subsequently exploded into chaos over accusations that moderators of r/Gaming have allegedly deleted thousands of comments about the Quinn scandal, and turned the forum onto auto-delete in order to clear out the rest.

Redditors have further accused the subreddit r/PCgaming of similarly blocking discussion of the thread.

In response, redditors have flooded the r/gaming thread, spamming it with over 20,000 comments within seven hours after it was created. After realizing that one of the r/Gaming mods had spoken to Quinn directly on Twitter, redditors screamed for his removal, only to get back a frosty response.

Meanwhile, other industry professionals are emerging to speak out, both on behalf of Quinn and in condemnation. Gaming commenter John Bain, known to the Internet as TotalBiscuit, took to Twitter for a lengthy take on the subject, simultaneously castigating the hearsay and rumor surrounding the issue, and criticizing Quinn's alleged use of DMCA takedowns to censor discussion.

Others were more blunt:

I am so horrified by the treatment of Zoe Quinn, and the despicable hypocrisy of these foul bigots who pretend it's about "ethics".

— John Walker (@botherer) August 19, 2014

Ultimately, the outcry over Quinn seems to bear out her initial fear, expressed to Gjoni months ago: "A woman's sexuality at all being public can sink that fucking ship."

Gjoni's initial post may give evidence that Quinn is a bad girlfriend, but it doesn't prove that Quinn had any intention to sleep her way into a job at Framed. Nor does it prove that Quinn traded sexual favors for positive reviews.

Instead, Zoe Quinn's private sex life has gotten caught in the crossfire of the ongoing tensions over gender inequality in gaming culture. And while Quinn's alleged attempts to suppress conversation about her sex life may have drawn that conversation further out into the public, the harassment she’s received in response has overshadowed anything she might have done to try to pre-emptively ward it off.

Ultimately, it seems likely that the noise surrounding this incident will serve as yet another example of the ways in which gaming culture continues to be a threatening place for women.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Reddit user goes by 1800JESUS69, and he knows all the bad things you’ve done.

This mysterious redditor has spent the past week spamming hundreds of users with the message “I know what you did. Can we talk please?”

1800JESUS69’s creepy note sent redditors’ pulses and fingers racing to figure out why they had been spammed.

Reddit’s investigation led to minecraftforum.net, where a user named The_mInecraftMan appears to have been one of the first people to receive 1800JESUS69’s message.

“Today I got a private message from someone on Reddit saying this ‘I know what you did. Can we talk please?,’” The_mInecraftMan wrote on Aug. 19. “I replied ‘Excuse me?’ and there has been no further conversation since. I'm kinda scared. Help?”

In a post on r/SubredditDrama, a subreddit focused on meta-Reddit drama, and r/Music, some redditors dialed 1800JESUS69 (1800-537-8769) and stumbled upon the following promotional message for Caribbean Cruise Line:

"I called the #, did the survey and got through to an operator,” wavestograves commented. “The woman on the line was from Southern Florida and asked me for my name and details. Interrupted her asking if there was any relation to AT, she sounded confused and said No. I asked for the service's website and she said www.bestcruisegetaway.com.”

The website for bestcruisegetaway.com has no contact information. The logo on the site, like its name, is identical to www.caribbeancl.com which lists Policy@caribbeancl.com and 1800-221-8200 as contacts. Both the email address and phone number were not in use.

A search for Caribbean Cruise Line on Yelp turns up a disturbing amount of reviews from people calling the business a “scam.”

“If there was a way to leave negative stars I would of,” Nabil wrote on Aug. 7. “[Don't] I repeat do not do business with them, most of their deals are scams and full of hidden fees, if money is no issue for you then the horrific customer service will get you.”

Photo by pfarrell95/Flickr (CC-BY SA 2.0)

Warning: This article contains explicit language that may trigger or upset some readers.

Reddit user yellowmix joined the team operating the r/BlackLadies subreddit about a year ago after growing sick and tired of being harassed. They were reguar users of the r/BlackGirls subreddit; but, as the community became increasingly swamped by a flood of posts from racist, sexist trolls, r/BlackGirls' moderators appeared to be doing almost nothing to actively stem the tide.

Frustrated, a bunch of r/BlackGirls users decided to split. They created a new subreddit called r/BlackLadies with the intention of carving out a safe space for African American women to discuss the issues important to them in an environment free from racist jerks.

And it worked, at least for a while.

The r/BlackLadies community grew into a place where nearly 5,000 subscribers chatted about everything from dealing with racism in the workplace to what Beyoncé wore when she walked down the red carpet. But then Ferguson happened. The controversy over the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager by a white cop in a St. Louis suburb seemed to bring out the worst in many users of a site that bills itself as the “front page of the Internet.”

In the wake of Ferguson, anonymous Reddit users on burner accounts deluged r/BlackLadies with racist posts and comments. The moderators—all volunteers, not paid Reddit employees—tried to delete the hateful content as best they could, but the entire experience exhausted and demoralized them. They contacted Reddit’s management, but were told that, because the trolls weren’t technically breaking any of the site’s core rules, there was there was nothing Reddit would do about it.

The women of r/BlackLadies were on their own to go through the subreddit on a near-hourly basis and hand-delete content like these:

Frustrated, the moderators of r/BlackLadies posted an open letter to Reddit’s management on Monday, calling for them to do something, anything, about the problem.

“Since this community was created, individuals have been invading this space to post hateful, racist messages and links to racist content, which are visible until a moderator individually removes the content and manually bans the user account. All of these individuals are anonymous, many of them are on easily-created and disposable (throwaway) accounts, and they are relentless, coming in barrages. Hostile racist users are also anonymously ‘downvoting’ community members to discourage them from participating. reddit admins have explained to us that as long as users are not breaking sitewide rules, they will take no action.

“The resulting situation is extremely damaging to our community members who have the misfortune of seeing this intentionally upsetting content, to other people who are interested in what black women have to say, as well as moderators, who are the only ones capable of removing content, and are thus required to view and evaluate every single post and comment. Moderators volunteer to protect the community, and the constant vigilance required to do so takes an unnecessary toll.

“We need a proactive solution for this threat to our well-being. We have researched and understand reddit’s various concerns about disabling downvotes and restricting speech. Therefore, we ask for a solution in which communities can choose their own members, and hostile outsiders cannot participate to cause harm.”

The moderators of r/BlackLadies aren’t alone in feeling this way. As of Tuesday afternoon, the operators of at least 43 other subreddits have agreed to co-sign the letter.

The co-signatory subreddits run the gamut from r/DumpsterDiving to /blerds (a community for African American nerds). The one thing nearly all of them have in common is a niche identity distinctly separate from the Reddit’s middle class, heterosexual, white, male norm.

The moderators of the r/rape subreddit, however, were especially enthusiastic to sign up.

The r/rape of today is very different from when the subreddit as first started. Originally run by Violentacrez, the grandaddy of all Reddit trolls, r/rape began as a place where Reddit users could post rape fetish porn. Violentacrez eventually handed r/rape over to a new set of moderators, who turned the subreddit into a community for victims for sexual violence.

For his part, Violentacrez moved that activity over to another subreddit called r/StruggleFucking (really), which is still active (really).

“Sadly the past of our sub means that the we regularly get visitors who are sexually aroused by the stories that some of our users tell and often feel the need to inform them of that fact in the most graphic of ways possible,” r/rape moderator scooooot told the Daily Dot. “You could imagine how that makes a rape survivor feel, especially those with fresh trauma. And, of course, they also often get very abusive with us when they are inevitably banned.”

According to scooooot, the subreddit’s former top moderator was chased off Reddit after enduring an overwhelming amount of harassment from other users and having her real-world identity revealed, a practice called “doxing” that is strictly forbidden by Reddit’s rules. Today, the r/rape’s moderators estimate that one-fifth of all content submitted to the subreddit is trolling.

Even so, the community’s moderators managed to turn r/rape into a supportive place for rape survivors and their loved ones. An auto-moderation bot helps, weeding out some of the most flagrant comments. But the subreddit’s moderators still have to read through every single post and comment thread manually to ensure no one is being attacked or degraded—a painful, grueling task.

Scooooot explained:

"Personally, there is nothing that I enjoy less than not only having to remove the messages that violate our rules but the messages of the person they are attacking. Not only were they forced to defend themselves and their account of events as if they were on trial, but I then remove their brave statements of defense. This is often the first time these survivors mentioned their rape to another person only to be told that they are lying or just a slut. And then I have to follow and take their words from them, usually because their half of the conversation can be triggering to other users. It doesn't feel good."

Here are a selection of comments the moderators have had to personally delete in the past month alone:

The problem doesn’t just extend to comments. Reddit has an internal messaging system that allows any user on the site to message any other. For the denizens of r/rape, that system has been consistently used as a venue for harassment—from verbal abuse all the way to rape and death threats.

“Initially, I was able to get these accounts … [permanently banned]. But a few months ago, the admins decided that rape threats were not a big enough issue to ban for,” explained r/rape moderator waitwhatnow.

Waitwhatnow recently reached out to a Reddit administrator for help dealing with an anonymous user who was repeatedly sending rape and murder threats to a sexual assault survivor and member of the r/rape community.

“I got no reply. Nothing was done,” waitwhatnow recalls. “I had about four or five users since then reporting similar problems, with screenshots, and I just had to tell them to block the person and that I'd ban the perpetrator from r/rape, but that was the best I could do. … Apparently, protecting the anonymous commenter's ability to terrorize an innocent person is far more important to Reddit than user safety.”

“Waitwhatnow” is actually this moderator’s second Reddit account. Two years ago, shortly after she became active on sexual assault survivor subreddits, she was doxed by a someone who had been harassing her through the site. “The person who did that threatened to kill my cat,” she said. “I also reported this to the admins and nothing was done.”

Representatives from Reddit did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

However, in a recent interview with The Wire, Reddit General Manager Erik Martin insisted that segregation was the key to ensuring Reddit was a place where anyone could feel comfortable contributing.

"As we do a better job of helping people find what they are looking for on Reddit and the communities they are looking for on Reddit and also help people do a better job of cultivating and creating the communities that they want I think there will be even more choices to participate and feel comfortable when they are there no matter what their interests are."

Yet, that argument starts to quickly break down when even insular, supposedly protected communities are beset by trolls.

Reddit has been reluctant to ban users for doing things that don’t violate the site’s core rules, which forbid just four types of activity: posting spam and child pornography, vote manipulation, and sharing other users’ personal information. Outside of that, Reddit’s administrators have largely attempted to avoid discriminating against certain types of content just because other users find that content offensive. It’s an attitude that’s allowed the site to flourish as a centralized hub where anyone stake out a plot of virtual ground and start a conversation about whatever they’re interested in—no matter how outré.

While the site’s commitment to unfettered free speech is, at one level, commendable, some see Reddit’s motives in allowing this sort content to flourish as being less than idealistic.

“In case you're curious why Reddit continues to allows these types of subs … you should ask yourself what kinds of traffic they generate,” scooooot says. “There was a reason it took them five years to shut down [popular pedophile pornography subreddit] r/jailbait. It wasn't free speech; at that point, r/jailbait was generating an ungodly amount of traffic for Reddit, mostly from unregistered users. That equals money, and the ability to brag about one billion unique visits a month.”

Without support from Reddit itself, moderators in subreddits infested with trolls are typically left to their own devices—often with some success.

For example, some subreddits that would appear to be natural enemies have effectively agreed on ceasefires. The moderators of r/ShitRedditSays, where users go to point examples of racist and misogynist content present elsewhere on the site, came to an understanding with the moderators of r/MensRights, which has a tendency to post a lot of misogynistic content: They delete links to each other’s material upon request. By keeping the two communities separate, the number of angry, unproductive, all-caps commenting matches decreased precipitously.

Another solution to the troll problem is to take the subreddit private, meaning only users who were personally invited by the moderators would be able to read and post content. However, going that route is one that yellowmix rejects outright, noting that, “being told to go private says that we must be invisible to be safe...tells the world that our speech does not belong in public."

Other members or the r/BlackLadies community agreed with that sentiment. This is a top comment on the open letter post:

Reddit isn’t the only place online dealing with exactly these sorts of issues.

Earlier this month, the female-focused blog Jezebel published a blog post calling out its parent company, Gawker Media, for failing to deal with what it called the site’s “rape gif problem.”

Trolls were filling the comments sections of Jezebel posts with gifs of violent pornography that the editors were having to comb through and manually remove, to the detriment of their job satisfaction and mental health. Despite repeated requests to deal with the issue by letting editors permanently ban users from commenting on the site based on their IP addresses, or manding users post with their real names through Facebook, Gawker brass hadn’t prioritized a solution—preferring to err on the side of letting users submit anonymously in the hopes that someone might submit a juicy tip.

The post sparked a massive outcry and, a few days later, Gawker rolled out a solution: a pending comments system where only users who had a proven history could automatically comment on articles. Unapproved users could still leave comments on Jezebel articles, but readers would have to click through to a special section in order to read them.

Yellowmix would like to see Reddit following Jezebel’s lead and implementing a “public view/approved participant” system for subreddits that choose to opt in—or to do as similar online aggregator Fark now does and “experiment with some basic standards of human decency as part of the site rules.”

“The site's culture will not change overnight, but they've historically done it with the rules on personal information, so it can be done,” yellowmix added. “At a minimum, we invite Reddit admins to commit to actively and directly work with communities affected by this problem toward developing solutions for it.”

However, not everyone in the subreddits besieged by trolls thinks the open letter is the best way to affect positive change.

The r/TwoXChromosomes community isn’t just the single largest and most influential subreddit dealing with women’s issues, it’s also the only one to listed as a default—meaning that everyone who visits the site sees content from it automatically on Reddit’s front page. When r/TwoXChromosomes was named as a default earlier this year, the community’s newfound prominence attracted a critical mass of misogynistic trolls.

As such, one would assume that its moderators would co-sign the the latter, but one would be wrong.

“Racism and bigotry are highly complex problems that cannot be solved with the signing of a letter, or a website policing its users, or giving the trolls a spotlight. We are patently disinterested,” subreddit co-founder HiFructoseCornFeces explained. “Growing up means realizing that combating evil does not mean spending all of your energy stamping out every last flicker of fuckery, but in issuing forth genuine goodness whole-heartedly and with resonance.”

Illustration by Jason Reed

Correction:  The article has been amended to calrify yellowmix's role in the creation of r/BlackLadies.

Over the weekend, I started a very popular Reddit Ask Me Anything thread about my time working at Walt Disney World as a princess.

I had plenty of photos and stories to share from the four years I played Mulan, Pocahontas, and Silvermist the fairy. As a longtime redditor, I decided it was finally time to let millions of people appreciate how strange my life has been.

I got an overwhelmingly positive response from it (aside from the people who are upset that I betrayed Walt Disney’s frozen carcass by revealing that my boob fell out of my Pocahontas dress once), but I was warned by many friends that creepy private messages would be flowing in. I didn’t believe them. This was a Q&A about Disney! People go there to throw their babies onto fake elephants while gorging themselves on churros and doing that awkward bobbing-up-and-down thing while a parade float whizzes by. Nobody was going to say anything creepy to me in a forum about the Most Magical Place on Earth™.

OK, let's start over. I am very aware of how the Internet works. It's a series of tubes that contain everyone's thoughts, feelings, and desires. Those feelings are sometimes really awesome, like the stories people shared with me about their Disney experiences. That being said, those same tubes sometimes contain the feelings of people who want to watch me eat peanut butter, slowly, while hula-hooping. Those are the people who decided to message me privately on Reddit.

Usernames have been scratched out to protect the identities of my potential kidnappers.

What I got from this is that my time is not worth a $27 large popcorn. I'm just Orville Redenbacher's and Faygo on the couch. You cut me deep, man.

Where’s the citation for your source? This is just irresponsible. 

Dear countless friends who keep sending me e-vites to incredibly fun things happening in Arkansas (nobody): I’m busy.

I have a high tolerance for creepy, and I know this one isn’t so bad. It’s just a bunch of hearts! Enjoy the compliment, Kristen! Ignore his username, which insinuates that he kills people in his spare time! Lighten up, would you?

I admire this guy's style. It's direct, and it doesn't take much to make him happy. And hey, at least he didn't do something weird, like ask me for pictures of my feet!

I think this message was the moment I decided I wouldn’t be taking any more questions.

Overall, I did receive some extremely nice messages. One person successfully identified me as the girl who drunkenly hit on him at a bar four years ago. (He’s probably super-handsome, because drunk me has never made a drunk mistake ever in my life). At the end of the day, I am really happy that I did the AMA and that people were able to remember their moments at Disney.

What did I learn? That the Internet is a pretty cool place. It’s like a campfire: Even though there are a few assholes playing “Wonderwall” on the acoustic guitar with absolutely nobody praising them, most people are there to have a good time and share stories. And not unlike real campfires, my socks and shoes will remain on at all times, for my own safety.

Photos via Kristen Sotakoun/Reddit

While parts of Reddit have been overrun with white supremacists in the wake of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Mo., other redditors have taken to debunking their nonsense.

In a particularly egregious example, racists have allegedly been sharing an image that purports to show a black man punching a white woman—fulfilling any number of odious stereotypes. It is shocking.

But, as redditor rrtaylor points out, this isn’t a photo snapped by some witness to an impromptu public beating. It’s a screencap from a laughably stupid Spider-Man sketch on YouTube. “You can actually see Spidey's web holding back the guy’s fist,” he wrote.

Not content to admit their idiocy and move on, at least one “race realist” pushed back.  

I don’t see what they’re so angry about. Don’t they want Spider-Man around to save their Caucasian ladies from brutish people of color? Oh wait, Spider-Man is an African-American/Hispanic teenager now. Never mind. 

Photo by Sam Howzit/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Let’s face it: ‘Net neutrality’ is a terrible term. It slides off the tongue like a wet noodle. And while many Americans care about keeping the Internet open and fair, the term alone inspires less passionate civic action and a lot more ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.  Worst of all, it’s just plain confusing.

Which is why one member of Congress thinks the term is counterproductive enough to warrant an immediate rebranding.

Congresswoman Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), who represents Silicon Valley and serves as the Ranking Member on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, started a contest on August 21 to give the net neutrality campaign a new name, and, she hopes, a new lease on life.

“Internet users know what they want and expect from the Internet, but these days all the jargon about net neutrality rules is making it difficult to know what box to check that advances their best interest,” Eshoo wrote in a post on Reddit’s r/technology community.

In a YouTube video announcing the contest, Eshoo added, “The ambiguous term describing this effort, ‘net neutrality,’ is being misused and abused in this debate. The American people are left with a muddled understanding of what to support.”

Eshoo said the purpose of the contest was to “bring some clarity to an otherwise muddy legal debate before the FCC finalizes its proposed open Internet rules.”

The Daily Dot supports bringing clarity to the open Internet debate, so we rounded up some suggestions from our staff for Eshoo’s rebranding initiative.

1) Internet fairness

A new term for net neutrality should definitely draw on the idea of fairness, if not the word itself. In the wake of the Great Recession, Americans have been paying more attention to whether or not a playing field is level, especially when large corporations are involved. People don’t like thinking that some system or structure in society is weighted toward one party’s interests. They already have an innate distaste for the kind of deck-stacking that the demise of net neutrality would represent. Appealing to their support for fairness is the best way to convey what the open Internet represents: interest-blind transmission of content.

2) Internet equality

Perhaps no word is more potent in these kinds of branding exercises than “equality.” Everyone wants to believe they have the same opportunity to use the Internet in creative and productive ways as their fellow consumers. “Net neutrality” doesn’t convey that concept very clearly.

“‘Net neutrality’ does suck, so the people who don't want to change it out of stubbornness are wrong,” Daily Dot reporter Patrick Howell O’Neill says. He discourages the use of the word data, as in “data equality,” a phrase he calls “esoteric.” 

“Who cares about ‘data’?” O’Neill says. On the other hand, “the Internet is powerful; everyone knows how important it is.”

Drawing from these language lessons, the phrase “Internet equality” conveys both the subject matter and the stakes very clearly.

3) Equal access

Following from the above theme about equality, Daily Dot contributing reporter Rob Price says, “Certain detractors of ‘net neutrality’ deride the principle as being anti-free-market over-regulation, but that's simply not the case. ‘Fast lanes’ stifle innovation, ossifying innovation, whereas net neutrality guarantees equality of opportunity for all, a central tenet of the American Dream." The term “equal access” certainly resonates with the all-powerful American Dream, particular insofar as it emphasizes that opportunity—not outcome—is the target of net neutrality regulation.

4) Common-sense connectivity

Messaging guru Frank Luntz’s “21 words for the 21st century” teaches that “common sense” is one of the most poignant words any movement can use. Just as Americans gravitate toward the idea of fairness, so too do they react favorably to policies that are described as no-brainers, or “just the right thing to do.” So it would be easy to make the case for unbiased content transmission if it were described as “common-sense connectivity.” After all, who wants to complicate the routing of Internet data packets with messy financial deals and preferential treatment? Just send all content equally. It’s “common sense.”

5) Free beer

If these ideas fail, there’s always “free beer.” As Daily Dot contributing reporter Dell Cameron says, “Whenever a member of Congress wants to undermine Internet freedom, they usually come up with a name that has something to do with cyberterrorism or protecting children from online predators. It's an election year. No one is going to vote against free beer.”

For those interested in submitting their own ideas to Eshoo’s contest, it runs until September 8. The submission in the comments section that receives the most upvotes will emerge victorious, but whether it will have a measurable impact on this long-running debate is anybody’s guess.

Photo via Bob Mical/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

It is the beer promotion of every college student and redditor's dream.

Austin Beerworks has released a monstrous 99-pack of beer of its Peacemaker Extra-Pale Ale.

The packs hit a handful of shelves in the Austin, Texas, area today. They were the brainchild of the Austin-based marketing agency Helms Workshop, which helped the brewery solve the problem it was having with moving its Peacemaker Extra-Pale Ale, bizjournals.com reported. People were confusing the product with an India Pale Ale, which has an entirely different flavor profile.

"Initially we didn't even think retailers would be excited about it, but they are. We are kind of caught with our pants down," Michael Graham, co-owner and co-founder of Austin Beerworks, told bizjournals.com. "We really only have 20 [of the] 99 packs available at the moment."

Prepping for a big day tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/UrKbOjIgYc

— Peacemaker (@AnytimeAle) August 27, 2014

Austin Beerworks was busy today posting Instagram shots of the limited-run cases getting snatched up at each location they stopped at.

The beer was a big hit on Reddit’s r/mildlyinteresting where redditor EpicMeh223 showed how someone got the 99-pack in his car.

“This is brilliant marketing,” MsPenguinette added. “I'm tempted to buy one because of the novelty (of course beer is the other reason). For a brewer, each one they sell moves a large amount of product relative to how much a customer who buys local buys will get. People switch their choices up with local brews so this gets their beer in your place to stay. Also a local brew at a party isn't typical.”

H/T Reddit  | Photo by Ian Sane/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

It's official: Reddit, on its very own blog, wants you to admire its shitty content.

An Aug. 28 post on Reddit's blog encouraged the community to take a break from the carefully constructed images, memes, and arguments that permeate most of the communities and, instead, focus their attention on its rather large helping of "shitty" subreddits, which serve as parody mirrors of their similarly titled counterparts.

Here’s just a sampling of the shit that Reddit offers:

r/shittyaskscience

While r/AskScience collects serious queries about several different scientific fields, r/shittyaskscience strives to answer those questions that all of us have asked at one time or another, especially if we have been drinking. Turn to this subreddit for information on everything from who is that one dentist who never agrees? to how can gravity be so strong if it doesn't even lift?

r/shittyaskreddit

It's no surprise that r/AskReddit itself can be somewhat of a joke; just glimpse the "New" submissions at any given time for proof of this. R/ShittyAskReddit takes things a few steps farther, providing its community with answers to questions like "what is the jail time for cardiac arrest?" and "why does glass taste like blood?"

r/shittyadviceanimals

Memes are becoming more and more of a headache for redditors. Fortunately, there is a subreddit that is dedicated to alleviating some of that hatred through parody. 

Photo via Kritiosman/Imgur

Photo via lascanto/Imgur

r/shittyearthporn

Forget the sweeping landscapes and natural beauty of the SFW Porn Network community r/EarthPorn. The subreddit's shitty counterpart aims to dazzle your eyes with those corners of our planet that may not be as breathtaking or majestic—but are frighteningly far more common.

Photo via intertim/Imgur

Photo via laosimerah/Imgur

r/shittyrobots

GIF via Reddit

Whether you realize it or not, chances are you actually have come across what is considered a "shitty robot." This community collects those devices whose construction has either gone awry or whose single-use purpose is simply no justification at all for the machine's existence in the first place.

Photo via therealstephen/Imgur

The post lists many other "shitty" subreddits, including r/ShittyAnimalFacts ("The Loch Ness Monster subsists mainly on its own excrement") and even r/ShittyTheoryofReddit ("NASA is responsible for Reddit"). In addition to the blog post, redditor “dylan” took the liberty of arranging a multireddit of the various shitty subreddits, ensuring that your entire Reddit experience will just plain stink.

Reddit will always have shitty content, whether we like it or not. But before we flush it with downvotes, take a moment and reflect upon on what makes the run-of-the-mill so wonderful.

Illustration by Jason Reed

Sometimes in the course of Web history, two memes merge so effortlessly that you would think it was a marriage ordained by the Internet gods above. In this case, the bride is the single-serving Tumblr Text From Dog, a blog filled with screenshots of exchanges between an ADHD canine and his frustrated owner. The groom is the popular subreddit r/showerthoughts, a place for the net to ponder all the banal existentialism and irony that occurs during daily bathing.

The consummation of their relationship is the glorious subreddit we never knew we wanted, r/dogshowerthoughts. The community is a place for man’s best friend to hold a modern day intellectual salon with his fellow butt-sniffers that dwells on life’s great quandaries like, “Do I want to go out because I want to come back in? Or do I want to come back in because I want to go back out?”

Though the subreddit only has a week's worth of posts, they're all gems in their respective rights. 

Sometimes they get a little politically extreme. 

They deal with insecurities we all feel. 

But mainly they're just thoughts your dog would ask if he accidentally got into those special human brownies. 

Our only hope is that the next time Nick Offerman narrates some shower thoughts in his rich timbre, they're of the canine variety. 

H/T Reddit | Photo via abardwell/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

It’s been called "Celebgate." It involves 4chan and a huge library of never-before-seen nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence, McKayla Maroney, and Krysten Ritter.

Sometime over the past 72 hours, a user of 4chan’s /b/ imageboard—where pornography, pranks, and vigilante justice rule supreme—offered up nudes of the world’s most recognizable celebrities in exchange for bitcoins.

As is often the case with any promise posted on /b/, no one took it seriously and proceeded to call the user a “fag,” 4chan’s double-edged term of endearment and insult.

Today, that user made good on his promise in a huge way.

They dumped photos allegedly showing Lawrence in a strappy black piece of lingerie, Glee star Lea Michele in a black lacy bra, and Olympic star Maroney in a black thong on /b/.

The Daily Dot will not include the photos in this story or links to them because it is unclear whether they are legitimate or Photoshopped. Most of these photos can be found on Reddit’s r/celebs and Imgur. According to the 4chan user, the photos appear to have been obtained through the iCloud accounts of these celebs. 

On Reddit’s r/nsfw, it has become a sort of game to see who can post the latest nudes first and reap a windfall of karma, the site’s internal mechanism for awarding comments and links. All of these photos are pornographic and NSFW.

The master list of celebs also includes soccer star Hope Solo, singers Victoria Justice and Ariana Grande, and actress Kirsten Dunst. The full list from 4chan can be seen here.

The leak has set 4chan off in a frenzy. Dozens of threads have been created across /b/ and /tv/ to share each image. As further proof that this immense library of nudes exists, the original 4chan user shared these two images of his desktop, showing thumbnails of photos yet to be leaked.

“This might be the best but also the saddest day in /b/'s history,” commented one random 4chan user in one of the threads. “We've been teased with all of these glorious pics. BUT there's lot's of videos out there, and I have a feeling that we will never get our hands on them because the dude is a hero but simultaneously a greedy hero. Think about it.. There's 60~ [Lawrence] vids out there that you might or might not see. It's going to haunt you forever.”

Update: On Twitter, Victoria Justice claims the alleged photos of her are fake. 

Photo by gageskidmore/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0) | Additional reporting provided by 4archive

A Canadian running for public office has incurred the wrath of Reddit after he accused commenters of slander.

Paul Alves, who is running in Toronto’s Ward 18 for city councillor, held an AMA (“ask me anything”) Saturday morning on r/toronto. Instead of answering questions about policy or Toronto's biking paths, Alves went on the defensive after one redditor brought up his comments on the Dufferin subway station renovations.

On his website, Alves questions where the $10 million in renovations went: “New tiles. No bathroom, no coffee shop, no extra benches so the elderly and disabled can sit down.”

“The 10+ million dollars spent could have been used much more wisely,” Alves added.

Redditor themightiestduck claimed that Alves’s comment made him sound like Rob Ford, the current mayor of Toronto who admitted to smoking crack.

“Unless you have a cost breakdown that shows me how those $10 million were spent, and an alternative to how you would have spent them ‘more wisely’, this point is just Ford-calibre bluster,” themightiestduck added.

This comparison did not sit well with Alves.

“Slander, in its purest form,” Alves commented under his username, paulthebookguy. “Do you happen to work for the Ana Bailao campaign? What's your motive? You do know you can be identified by reddit account and slander is illegal, yes? Share your opinion, be a troll but ease off on the fantasy. I normally support Liberal but this year i may hold my nose closed and vote Tory.”

From there, redditors pounced on Alves’s misinterpretation of slander and how it took him about nine hours to respond to questions on Reddit in the first place, and called him a child. 

Instead of moving on, Alves doubled down on his outrage and claimed that he would “gladly retain counsel and sue for slander anyone who claims I'm what i am not.”

Shortly after the Reddit backlash, Alves removed his name from the AMA while still responding to some comments.

The people of Toronto will vote on Oct. 27. For Alves's sake, let’s hope they don’t visit Reddit.

Photo by  paul bica/Flickr (CC By 2.0)

Warning: This article contains language and subject matter that may be NSFW.

On Sunday, hackers leaked dozens of intimate photos of numerous celebrities, including Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Krysten Ritter and Ariana Grande, in what many have dubbed #CelebGate. The users of popular link-sharing site Reddit have given a more masturbatory name: “The Fappening.”

The flagrant sharing of these intimate photos has sparked a strange conflict among Redditors: The site has a robust position as a platform for unfiltered free speech, but redditors also fiercely guard their privacy. Disclosing the identity, or “doxing,” other users is strictly prohibited by Reddit’s rules, and users who violated are regularly banned from the site. For now, however, it looks like the “free speech” side is winning.

Originally leaked to 4chan’s notorious /b/ imageboard by a hacker allegedly seeking Bitcoin donations, the photos have spread across the Internet like wildfire, to the dismay of the celebrities involved.

Reddit has become a particular hub for the photos. While Reddit hosts none of the photos itself, its users are linking to them off-site and discussing them with impunity—and now the moderators of the new community (called a subreddit) r/thefappening claim that the site’s admins are aware of the photos and happy to see them shared on Reddit, despite the threat of legal action.

Reddit’s site-wide rules forbid the posting of “person information,” which these photos certainly seem to constitute. Posting “publicly available” information on celebrities is acceptable—but“it is not okay” to post links to “screenshots of Facebook profiles,” or anything potentially “inviting harassment.” If a users’ Facebook photos are a no-go, then it seems implausible in the extreme to suggest that stolen intimate photos could not also be considered “personal information.” Despite this, links to previous leaked photos shared on the site—including of Demi Lovato and Jeanette McCurdy—remain live, several months later.

Twitter is actively deleting the photos, and reportedly suspending users who continue to face them, and image-hosting site imgur also appears to be taking steps to remove the content—though dozens of albums are still online and linked to from across Reddit.

Some users have accused Reddit admins of censorship and deleting the photos—but this does not appear to be the case. Instead, individual mods of some subreddits are taking the proactive decision to delete the images; for example, the mods of r/jenniferlawrence, an early repository of the photos, have decided“to remove all of them and continue to keep this sub clean of them.” Meanwhile, r/celebs’ moderators have made the decision to continue to link to them, apparently without consequences.

“It seems pretty scummy (to me, at least) to allow this stuff here since it was obtained without the consent of the women involved,” but nonetheless, “as of right now, we are still allowing these pics here,” reads an official statement by r/celebs moderator atticus138.

The epicentre of the leaked photos, r/thefappening, has gained almost 75,000 subscribers in its 15-hour lifespan—a number that continues to rise by the minute. An official statement in the subreddit apparently confirms that the Reddit admins are indeed are aware of the subreddit, but have simply decided to remove r/thefappening from appearing on Reddit’s front page of most-popular posts, known as r/all.

“Some of you have wondered why you are not seeing any posts from this subreddit in r/all,” a statement reads. “Per the suggestions of reddit’s admins we have decided to remove this subreddit from r/all indefinitely. We did not act on this until we were contacted by the admins and they politely suggested we take this action.”

Reddit did not immediately respond to the Daily Dot’s request for comment.

In the absence of confirmation, there is another option: that the moderators of r/thefappening are lying about the contact with Reddit administrators. But it’s unclear why they’d do this: Lying about the admins’ policies would likely endanger their subreddit’s existence, and other the mods subreddits—notably r/celebs—freely admit that they’ve made similar decisions to withdraw from r/all “because it seemed to be in bad taste,” without any admin involvement.

One user speculates that the admins are trying to keep the content “quarantined” in r/thefappening—but even if the subreddit’s moderators are lying, the photos are nonetheless being shared widely across Reddit with seemingly no repercussions.

So, is Reddit’s stance actually illegal? It’s unclear. Reddit hosts none of the images itself (the site doesn’t have that functionality), but the site’s admins appear to be happy to continue to have them linked to. A spokesperson for Jennifer Lawrence has already confirmed that they intend to “prosecute” anyone who posts the photos, but it’s not clear if this threat extends to websites that allow the posting of links to them, or what criminal charges might be used against those who share the photos online.

Of course, even if it’s not illegal, then that doesn’t mean it’s ethical. Lawrence’s spokesperson described the leak as a “flagrant violation of privacy,” and linking to the photos seems to run counter to Reddit’s own strongly pro-privacy culture. After Gawker’s Adrien Chen unmasked the identity of controversial moderator Violentacrez, the moderators of dozens of large subreddits made the decision to ban Gawker articles, so fiercely they guard their users’ privacy. As such, Reddit’s admins’ apparent position is out-of-kilter with its own rules and the community’s collective values.

This seeming contradiction has not gone unnoticed: Twitter users have lined up to lambast the site and its users for sharing the photos, with Reddit “celebrity” shitty_watercolor among the critics:

reddit, ladies and gents... pic.twitter.com/R8eibLD292

— Shitty Watercolour (@SWatercolour) August 31, 2014

Reddit/4chan/etc: "The NSA is invading our privacy. Expose them." "Dude, look at these nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence some guy stole!"

— Charles Clymer (@cmclymer) September 1, 2014

The top ten posts right now on reddit - which hates doxing, remember - are illegally acquired nudes

— Gamer Murderer 69 (@a_girl_irl) August 31, 2014

Some Redditors defend the sharing of the photos on principle, with Megaross saying“no one has the right to say what you shouldn’t see,” and that “it’s a slippery slope from celebrity nudes to political statements to media alteration and blackout.” Others, however, are extremely critical of those that defend the photos on the grounds of free speech.

Redditors on r/videos have also poked fun at the userbase’s hysterical reaction the photos with videos:

Some of the actresses involved have claimed the alleged photos are “fake”—but others, like Lawrence, have confirmed their veracity. Actor Mary Winstead angrily railed against those posting the photos on Twitter:

To those of you looking at photos I took with my husband years ago in the privacy of our home, hope you feel great about yourselves.

— Mary E. Winstead (@M_E_Winstead) August 31, 2014

Going on an internet break. Feel free to my @'s for a glimpse of what it's like to be a woman who speaks up about anything on twitter 👍

— Mary E. Winstead (@M_E_Winstead) September 1, 2014

Glee star Becca Tobin, on the other hand, seems to have embraced the leak of her private photos—or at least decided to feign lightheartedness:

Merry XXXmas!

— Becca Tobin (@becbecbobec) September 1, 2014

Reddit’s admins may yet perform an about-face and ban the subreddit and links to the photos: After all, it wouldn’t be the first time the site curtailed discussion of a breaking news story after it got out of hand. In the aftermath of the 2013 Boston Bombings, a subreddit established to search for clues descended into a “witch hunt,” admitted the admins, doxing totally innocent Americans, and was eventually banned.

But even if that happens, the fact remains: Reddit admins apparently saw the growth of r/thefappening, discussed it, and chose to do nothing.

The Daily Dot has reached out to Reddit, to imgur, and to the moderators of r/thefappening, and will update if they respond.

Photo via Ian Muttoo/Flickr (CC BY SA 2.0) | Remix by Jason Reed

There is a place on Reddit where people go to not masturbate. Well, technically, there are a lot of places on Reddit where users (probably) don’t go seeking masturbation fodder, but, there’s one community, r/nofap, that functions like a support group for people who are trying to quit masturbating cold jerky turkey.

As with anything that can be addictive, avoiding giving in to temptation is easier on some days than it is on others. For the denizens of r/nofap, the day after a trove of nude pictures of female celebrities were leaked online was not one of those easy days.

On Sunday, a hacker allegedly acquired shots of such celebrities as Jennifer Lawrence and Lea Michele by compromising Apple’s cloud photo storage service, iCloud. By Monday morning, the front page of r/nofap was filled with people basically treating the release of the nudes as the equivalent of a recovering alcoholic accidentally walking into a bar giving out free booze on St. Patrick’s Day:

Some users posted messages offering moral support and tips for avoiding temptation:

Others slammed the weak-willed among them, insisting that staying masturbation-free was still easily doable:

Still others put in the context of seminal Japanese anime Dragonball Zbecause of course they did:

Users compared navigating the Internet when chatter about the pictures has seemingly derailed all other conversations to a playing a game of Minesweeper and extolled the advantages of being a non-self-pleasuring gay man because all of the photos leaked were of female celebrities.

The entire thing was made even more difficult by trolling users who have repeatedly submitted pornographic images to the subreddit after a story about the difficulties its users were having was posted to a separate Reddit community, r/TheFappening, which has become the site's central repository for the stolen images.

Ironically, the birthplace of r/nofap was 4chan, the same anarchic message board where the nude pictures first appeared online. In 2009, 4chan, along with a handful of other online message boards, saw some of its users participating in a month-long challenge to see if they could go a 30 days without pleasuring themselves.

The concept soon spread to Reddit, where the r/nofap community was born.

As the wiki post about the subreddit explains:

You set your own goals. We're just here as a supporting service to try and help you along. We're not here to say that masturbation is unhealthy or evil. We would never agree to a sweeping statement like that. In fact, you're bound to find a range of opinion here. What unites the NoFap community is simply a desire to stop masturbating and utilizing pornography—maybe for a day, maybe for a month or longer—and our determination to help one another achieve our goals.

“NoFap was originally a place for a small group of people to abstain from only masturbation for a period of time through weekly and monthly challenges,” r/nofap creator Alexander Rhodes told the Kernel a few years later. ‟This ‘ultimate challenge’ was performed as a test of willpower or a motivation tool, stemming off of this thread in r/GetMotivated. Soon after, we began to realize the tremendous benefits we were experiencing and wanted to continue experimenting more frequently and for longer periods of time—and the NoFap 90 day challenge was born.”

When it comes to the recent release of nudes, the overall message from the community is to stay strong. If ‛fapstonauts,' as they affectionately call themselves, can make it through this week without giving in to the temptation of something they’ve put your mind to avoiding, they should give themselves a hand.

Actually, on second though, maybe they shouldn’t.

Photo by R. Jason Brunson/Wikimedia Commons (public domain)