Reddit's under fire again — this time for a section where users post secretly-taken photos of women . Unless it's illegal, creepy content is the price of an open platform, Reddit GM Erik Martin suggests.
Every three months, or maybe six, it happens: A new section of Reddit gets attention for being gross, immoral, or, most commonly, creepy. Last year it was /r/jailbait, a forum where users posted borderline pornographic photos of teens; a couple months ago it was /r/Photobucketplunder, where users posted private photos from compromised Photobucket accounts. This week, it's /r/creepshots, surreptitiously-taken, implicitly sexual photographs of anonymous women.
Reddit's creepiness problem is part of an ongoing identity crisis on the massive social site, a tension between the emerging voice of a united community, on one hand; and the studied neutrality of a anything-goes online messageboard. Creepy features like creepshots have drawn criticism for years, but they have survived even a recent visit from the President of the United states, who did a Q&A on the site in August. And the man who oversees the site is probably not going to go away.
The site is a neutral platform, first and foremost, Reddit General Manager Erik Martin told BuzzFeed.
"We have 10,000 active subreddits, and over 100,000 total. And anyone can create a subreddit, the person who creates it is sort of the default moderator, and they can add other moderators, who can then add other moderators," Martin said.
This is also true of the site's largest sections, which are featured on its frontpage by default.
"All of them are completely run by users," he repeated.
"We don't get in involved unless it has someting to do with rules," Martin explained. While individual Reddit communities make their own rules — Martin repeated a quote he had given another reporter earlier today, that a forum moderators could ban all posts that start with "g" if they wanted to — Reddit, the platform, has very few. Reddit.com/rules goes a long way toward explaining why Martin finds himself answering questions about offensive, alarming or morally repugnant subreddits on a fairly regular basis. There are just five commandments, and only two relate to content:
Reddit's only rules:
