I’ve been a regular user of Reddit for the past five years (though admittedly of the less controversial subreddits such as r/fitness and r/bicycling), and have some problems with the way you’ve presented information here. Your title, as you admit in the sixth paragraph, is false. Reddit, (where ‘Reddit’ refers to the site and its administrators) has blocked nothing.

Any user of Reddit is free to create a subreddit (sub), of which they then become a moderator. They can add other moderators with the same administrative rights, if they wish. The moderators of any sub can impose pretty much any rules they wish; many subreddits don’t allow links to *any* websites, permitting only self-posts (posts that link to a reddit page, as opposed to an external site, to prevent ‘karma-whoring’). This is exactly what has happened here; as you explained, the administrators of r/politics have blocked links to Gawker sites. No site administrator has done anything, only the sub’s moderators have acted. r/politics itself is a cesspool of sensationalist left-wing and libertarian nonsense, where sensible discourse is rarely to be found.

The ‘default’ subreddits, those to which visitors to the site who are not logged-in see by default, are determined by an algorithm that measures the popularity of submissions in each subreddit, and the ensuing discussion. No site administrator has chosen r/politics to be a default, it just came in the top ten as given by the algorithm.

Reddit (the site)’s attitude to free speech is not complex: anything is allowed, unless it breaks the law (or sails too close to the wind). Again, individual subreddits’ moderators may choose to allow or deny free speech as they choose: anyone posting derogatory comments about the DPRK or Kim Il Sung in r/pyongyang will find themselves immediately banned (unable to post or comment in that particular subreddit, not the site as a whole). Only subs that break the law, or draw too much ire for *possibly* breaking the law, are shut-down by the site’s administrators. This was the case with r/jailbait and r/creepshots.

A sub that you have failed to mention, r/shitredditsays, has been engaged in similar activity to predditors for some time. Some of its individual users have also been caught flouting the ‘no doxxing’ rule, and have blackmailed other uses who post or comment creepy things they’d rather people in their lives didn’t know about. Again, I’ll stress: this is individual users threatening individual users, but the users of certain subreddits engage in it more than others. All of these actions (banning, being creepy, threatening others) are found within the Reddit community; saying ‘Reddit did this’ is misleading.

Regarding the violentacrez case: it is clear that this guy is *very* creepy indeed. Many of the users who interacted with him were quick to defend him as a lovely chap, but I simply cannot reconcile that view with the kind of content that he posted and moderated. However, if he was not doing anything illegal then he was well within his rights to be as weird and disturbing as he wanted to. Given that, what’s wrong with the administrators of the site or a particular subreddit defending that right by wishing to protect his annonymity? Being creepy is not illegal; we all have proclivities we’d rather the world not know about.

By doxxing and essentially blackmailing violentacrez, Chen was engaging in the same awful behaviour that other users of the site have been known to engage in, *and if caught are banned as a result*. Gawker Media’s relationship with Reddit is far more complex than Reddit’s attitude to free speech: they lift stories from Reddit on a daily basis to drive their advertising revenue, and when the content is to odious to lift directly, they write a scathing article decrying Reddit as a whole for allowing such terrible stuff. Many redditors dislike Gawker for their hypocrisy, and so banning links to Gawker sites on r/politics will no-doubt be popular with the subreddit’s users.

In stating that “the site is certainly incredibly creepy”, you’ve completely missed the point of Reddit: taking the site, all its subreddits and all its users, and denouncing them in a single stroke is as misguided as doing the same with the Internet as a whole: “You post programming questions on StackOverflow? Must be some sort of pervert.” Most disappointingly of all, Gawker Media and the Daily Mail have been doing this for years; you really are late to that particular party.

It's worth pointing out the title "Reddit blocks Gawker in defence of its right to be really, really creepy" somewhat implies it was the owners/administrators of Reddit who banned Gawker links, but this is not the case. The moderators of r/politics are not the owners of Reddit as a whole, they are just members of the community who happen to moderate a subreddit. Users, in other words. This Gawker ban is in no way sanctioned by Reddit as a whole entity; in fact a much more accurate title would be "Subreddit moderators block Gawker from their subreddit in defence of another Reddit user's right to be really, really creepy".

That said, I think Alex was fair to point out the individualistic culture fostered on Reddit; that is exactly why the admins would not ban an entire domain from the site. They only do that for spam and phishing sites.

Finally I don't want this comment to be taken as defence of the /r/politics moderators or violentacrez. The latter is decidedly creepy and /r/politics itself is about as balanced in political discourse as Fox News.