On Reddit, it’s hard to gauge where the trolling ends and serious discussion beginsĪt some point over the life of Reddit - thanks to the site’s constant interplay of ideological clashes, ironic use of the term “trolling,” and actual attempts to derail discussions intermingling with ironic attempts to pretend to derail discussions - it became pretty difficult to distinguish a “troll” takeover of a topic from, well, just a topic.įor instance, there’s a popular “troll network” of subreddits devoted to memes, reaction GIFs, and jokes - but unlike countless other similar subreddits on the site, this network’s defining trait is that its subreddits are attempting to be fundamentally safe spaces for women and other marginalized users.
How did we get here? Basically, this is one delightful byproduct of Reddit’s larger, rampant troll culture. On Reddit, however, proactive users created r/Stormfront before it could be created by racists, and now that subreddit routinely looks like this:
For instance, in the murky online world of white supremacism, the word “stormfront” refers to the largest online community of neo-Nazis. The takeover is part of an established trend among Reddit users to hijack or preemptively create pernicious subreddits and turn them benign. For example: The link described as “why whites must be separated from blacks” above directs to an article on laundry sorting. Reddit’s r/WhitePolitics and r/Whites subreddits have both been taken over and turned into havens of color discussion.
So they’ve taken over a few dormant white supremacist subreddits themselves - and filled them with topical debates about colors. On Reddit, they’re joining forces to resist the takeover of their color by racists.Īs the Daily Beast reports, trolls on Reddit have gotten fed up with the encroachment by right-wing extremists onto the site’s more mainstream areas.
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