In addition to what everyone else said, which is basically right, I suspect that reddit has thorough data and research tracking how topics are discussed en-masse and how narratives form across the site. I would wager that we were visible enough to actually make a dent in the liberal centrist "hive mind" and they had an incentive to snuff us out before our ideas started to affect the general vibes of the place by providing coherent, popular, and catchy anti-capitalist and anti-American sentiments
We were inciting violence against long dead historical figures. That's the official reason. In reality reddit has consistently b& subreddits which turn a critical lens on the rest of the site.
The earliest one I can remember being a part of was the r/shitredditsays community which helped expose a bunch of child porn adjacent and other gross communities and misanthropic power users. Nothing was done about these communities until the efforts of r/SRS to shed light on them were picked up by more mainstream media platforms. This resulted in the questionable communities being banned (they mostly just popped back up under different names) and also the r/SRS subreddit network being banned.
Reddit will tolerate circlejerk and drama communities, but once people actually take intra-site activism seriously they shut that shit down ASAP every time because advertisers tend to recoil in horror once they learn what the platform actually hosts.
The dynamics are a bit different these days now that platforms are being co-opted by well funded political parties and their subsidiary support orgs.
/r/cth was the only subreddit openly cheering the George Floyd uprising and subsequent race riots; we had dope pictures of the precinct and cars going up in flames.
It didn’t help as a mod, I’d re-approve removed comments which I thought did not deserve it. 😅
it was saying that it was good to kill slave owners and that john brown did nothing wrong. and not removing posts that said that even though reddit told the mods that they had to take it down cuz it was "violent rhetoric."
r/cth had gained some amount of notoriety in the public eye years before even the quarantine. It was a meme that the subreddit was more popular than the podcast.
I went digging and here were some posts from the r/cth mods when communicating about the quarantine.
The moderators’ changes came two weeks ago, after a group of leftists users from the r/ChapoTrapHouse podcast subreddit had allegedly “brigaded” r/Libertarian. (“Brigading” is a Reddit term for when outside users come into a group to troll it by downvoting posts.) One of r/Libertarian’s moderators, Reddit user rightc0ast, and new moderators that rightc0ast brought on between December 6 and 7, argued that they needed to tighten the group’s laissez-faire rules to protect it from outside trolling.
...
The subreddit’s users, along with posters in other libertarian subreddits like r/LibertarianUncensored and r/LibertarianPartyUSA, immediately decried the changes as a departure from libertarian ethos while calling attention to the background of users behind the change. Most of the five new moderators have a posting history showing them taking part in r/The_Donald, an infamous pro-Trump subreddit, and r/Physical_Removal, a subreddit dedicated to the idea of eventually forcibly removing liberals and leftists from society that was banned in 2017 for “posting content that incites violence.” Two of the moderators who helped engineer the changes—one has since been removed—had previously voiced support for the regime of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and debated the merits of fascism.
Rightc0ast, who played a key role in taking over the group by inviting new allied moderators, has a particularly troubling trail of posts across Reddit. In August 2017, Rightc0ast promoted the then-upcoming Unite The Right white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia. The white nationalist provocateur has also backed the idea of an ethnostate and supported the Fash The Nation podcast, which was created by a neo-Nazi blog. On Reddit, he was a moderator of r/The_Donald and a moderator of r/Physical_Removal.
About SomethingAwful's old Left section that was the :cool-zone: where all the hip kids hung out, making everybody jealous.
Eventually calls for violence grew louder. At one point, the Secret Service contacted Lowtax (who runs SA) about all the constant death threats to the president-which in retrospect is hilarious.
...
LF was becoming a left-wing version of /pol/ (albeit with a lot less real world impact) and was being put down. At one point everyone who posted in the forum was given the av with "certified forum cancer" and their texted greyed out unless you hovered over it (yes seriously). Then finally by around late 2011 it got shut down.
I remember the last post on there was a thread saying "if this place gets banned then thanks for being the only non-trans specific subr*ddit that actually gives a shit about us on this site" and then the sub got nuked
Correction: NCRI removed “ISIS” from the report’s initial comparison table because many interpreted this claim to mean NCRI was depicting Anarchists/Socialist threats as the same magnitude of ISIS.
banned r/The_Donald that day too. Reddit admins wanted to seem fair & balanced as if they hadn’t been profiting off of allowing several openly white nationalist hate subreddits to infest their platform for years until it was absolutely necessary to ban them to save their ad dollars and IPO prospects.
It's also worth nothing that r/The_Donald's userbase had moved off of reddit to one of their fashie sites months ago, and the subreddit had been completely dead for months when they banned it.
It’s also interesting how this is happening with llms
Rhetoric that threatens existing power structures has no room to linger. Since fascism still shares a lot of traits with unmitigated and decaying capital (in addition to the fact that LLMs are trained on Reddit) it hangs around much longer than leftist rhetoric that is openly hostile to the bourgeois.
This is jogging my memory now. I remember when The_Donald was banned and people talking about CTH getting banned too. Gotta cut each end of the horseshoe right?
They had a thread about Unite the Right where the OP was ”I know ’ethnostate’ people are going to be there, but that's the price we have to pay”, they weren't even subtle about associating with Nazis and promoted far more violence than CTH ever did, yet the sub was allowed to exist for years.
It was popular and sorta leftist. As long as those two conditions existed it was doomed. If it were not banned for one particular post it would have been for another convenient or contrived reason.
Yeah, it was me sorry. I finally posted hog and it was considered too hot for Reddit to handle so they banned me, and every sub i had ever posted in just to be sure. My B.
Saying slavers should get shot. Bunch of crybaby shitlibs reported us for "violent rhetoric" and reddit had to ban something on the left to seem even handed because it was banning the_Donald at the same time.