Reddit has won itself a well-deserved reputation as a place where anything goes – particularly if that “anything” involves the degradation of women. During the debacle known as The Fappening, Reddit’s admins allowed their site become one of the primary internet conduits for the distribution of a virtual cache of illegally obtained celebrity nudes – including some featuring celebs who were underage when their pictures were taken. The admins only took TheFappening subreddit down when it appeared they might face legal consequences. By then the subreddit had already racked up hundreds of millions of pageviews, earning Reddit enough to pay for its server costs for several months (and possibly much more).
The admins’ casual tolerance for TheFappening wasn’t much of a surprise to anyone who has paid attention to the site for any length of time. Reddit for years hosted an assortment of subreddits devoted to sexualized, often stolen pictures of underage girls – even honoring the man responsible for the popular JailBait subreddit with an Reddit Alien statuette as an award; the admins only banned the subreddits after activists and an assortment of media outlets reported that child porn was being openly traded on r/jailbait.
The trouble is, this sort of awfulness appeals enormously to Reddit’s user base; even if they don’t partake in it themselves, Redditors tend to react with outrage whenever the admins – belatedly – take down subreddits that have become a danger to the site’s reputation. Jailbait was an extraordinarily popular subreddit, and many Redditors still mourn the day it was taken down.
And while PhilosophyOfRape has only picked up a tiny handful of subscribers in the first few days of its existence – and a small army of detractors who’ve collectively spammed the subreddit with kitten pics – other subreddits with a similar, er, appeal –from RapingWomen and BeatingWomen2 to HotRapeStories and ChokeABitch – collectively have thousands of subscribers. CuteFemaleCorpses, a subreddit devoted to sexualizing pictures of actual dead women, managed to rack up a little more than 800,000 pageviews last month. The WatchPeopleDie subreddit boasts 44,000 subscribers.
http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/10/01/reddit-hits-a-new-low-with-a-subreddit-promoting-the-corrective-rape-of-sluts-and-harlots/
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