After months of bending over backwards to explain why a subreddit dedicated to violent hate speech against black people was OK, Reddit’s new CEO announced today that /r/CoonTown is no more.

Previously, Reddit’s new CEO Steve Huffman had said booming hate communities like CoonTown were acceptable because it was important to have a vital meeting of the minds: “I don’t think you can win an argument by simply silencing the opposition.”

Not anymore, I guess:

Today we are releasing an update to our Content Policy. Our goal was to consolidate the various rules and policies that have accumulated over the years into a single set of guidelines we can point to.

Thank you to all of you who provided feedback throughout this process. Your thoughts and opinions were invaluable. This is not the last time our policies will change, of course. They will continue to evolve along with Reddit itself.

Our policies are not changing dramatically from what we have had in the past. One new concept is Quarantining a community, which entails applying a set of restrictions to a community so its content will only be viewable to those who explicitly opt in. We will Quarantine communities whose content would be considered extremely offensive to the average redditor.

Today, in addition to applying Quarantines, we are banning a handful of communities that exist solely to annoy other redditors, prevent us from improving Reddit, and generally make Reddit worse for everyone else. Our most important policy over the last ten years has been to allow just about anything so long as it does not prevent others from enjoying Reddit for what it is: the best place online to have truly authentic conversations.

I believe these policies strike the right balance.

He added:

Today we removed communities dedicated to animated [child pornography] and a handful of other communities that violate the spirit of the policy by making Reddit worse for everyone else: /r/CoonTown, /r/WatchNiggersDie, /r/bestofcoontown,/r/koontown, /r/CoonTownMods, /r/CoonTownMeta.

It took months and months of public criticism and internal controversy, and general tumult for the site’s management to decide that “WatchNiggersDie” did not belong on Reddit.

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
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