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I didn't say the reddit admins secretly liked that content. Rather, they liked the members who moderated those seedy subreddits. I would also disagree with your portrayal of my drawing of the cultural lines. Regardless of the more tech libertarian origins versus the more outright social liberal position today, Reddit has always been anti-social conservatives, specifically Evangelicals. R/atheism used to be one of the default subreddits and the thrust of its content was not atheists discussing atheism intellectually but rather them deriding Evangelicals as bigoted idiots. This theme continues today- just yesterday, the top post I saw on reddit was some secret gay conservative Christian getting outed.
I also don't agree banning jailbait led to a slippery slope. You can have site rules that are required to participate, without micromanaging the opinion of users on your site. So, you can ban images that abuse the bodies of children as a site rule. The problem is when these rules are applied inconsistently or in a biased manner. For instance, to Reddit, it's fine to saying completely bigoted things against Christians about how dumb they are because of a religious position they hold, but woe unto thee if you say anything slightly antagonistic about someone who is transgender. It's fine to make fun of people whose conscience has been seared towards a certain religious identify but not those compelled to a certain gender identity. And also, it's even fine to make fun of certain gender identities (see /r/femaledatingstrategy)! So, discrimination is bad except when it's not per reddit.
For me, the dye was cast when reddit banned the incels. There, one deranged individual on the subreddit, who was planning violence, was invoked as the reason to ban the whole subreddit, even though the subreddit had rules against that kind of behavior and would have banned that member for that behavior. We all know the reason Reddit banned it was because it was a zoo for them and was getting bad publicity. The subreddit /r/femaledatingstrategy is just as sexist and disgusting, but no bans for it.
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