I recognize that this is a harsh thing to say, but he's lying. Reddit has always stood forth against censorship. In part, this is a libertarian thing. Mostly it's because they don't want to be censors. If you're going to say "this is not allowed" you need a mechanism in place to deal with things that aren't allowed. Reddit lacks this mechanism. Bans are hand-coded - Huey has to write them in, one at a time. IP bans aren't possible. I've had maybe six (closed door) conversations with first keysersosa, then jedberg, then hueypriest about why they don't just block URLs if spam is really such an issue. They've never once answered this - it falls in their "we have a secret" category and they get all cagey. Thing is, you can reverse engineer what they can and can't do. If they could block domains that they don't want, they would. They can't. Reddit's code is open-source, has been since 2007. Yet nobody runs it (well, almost nobody: http://webtoid.com/r/beatingwomen/ ). The only part that isn't open-source is their "anti-spam" measures, which they keep really really secret, and which they insist aren't just them going around and fuzzing data and obfuscating things from users... because if that's what they're doing, then their traffic numbers become suspect etc. etc. So whenever you talk about "why, theoretically, can't you do (simple thing that would make things so much better for your community)?" the answer is always either "we'd love to, but we can't explain why we can't do that right now" or "for reasons that violate our anti-spam policy." The emperor has no clothes. SomethingAwful just gave Reddit a choice: start policing the content of 1.4 million people, by hand, with fewer people than are on a basketball court... or face the unholy wrath of a media machine that hates pedophiles more than Ahmadinejad. One lowly Anderson Cooper story didn't cause them to do anything, which should tell you how much they hate doing this. And it's not because they're big fans of child porn. And it's not because they're die-hard libertarians with a strict originalist view of civil rights. It's because they face an existential threat. Reddit celebrated when they were moved sideways, directly under Advance Media rather than Conde Nast. I'll bet they didn't celebrate half as much as Conde Nast did. Remember, this is a company that just launched an entertainment company: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/10/11/conde-n... ...can you think of a better way to get in the MPAA's good graces than, say, killing the website that launched the SOPA protests? Like I said, interesting times.