Controversy on Reddit is developing a half-life.
Last week, a new eyebrow-raising section, r/girlsyouknow, popped up—and then was quickly shut down by its creator.
r/girlsyouknow asked Reddit users, or redditors, to post pictures, of, well, girls they knew (specifically lifted from Facebook pages — and featuring a mix of revealing and not-so-revealing shots). The section stirred up a fair bit of outrage, which culminated in the creator deciding to shut down the section for good..
Reddit’s community prizes free speech. Almost anything goes on the site, from the mundane to the racist to the pornographic and misogynistic. Usually, the controversial places stay small and off the radar of Reddit at large—at least until an angry redditor does some front-page foot-stamping about how awful the sections are.
But those fits of oft-justified outrage are usually impotent.
Sections rarely fold in the face of controversy, and Reddit staff members rarely ban them. The controversial teen-pic section r/jailbait won Reddit’s “worst community of the year” award in 2008. It underwent heavy media scrutiny for years. Even then, admins only took that section down after it was taken over by a cabal of moderators with reputations for making trouble.
This time, however, all of Reddit’s anger actually accomplished something. r/girlsyouknow is dead, killed by its creator, kingsleyz.
In a post announcing the section’s closure last week, kingsleyz said he had no idea the subreddit would attract the kind of attention it did. When he created it, he says all he wanted was some innocent, amateur sexual stimulation:
“This wasn’t meant to be an ill-mannered personal invasion of privacy, but I suppose it could be used that way,” kingsleyz wrote in the post announcing the section’s closure. “All of the pictures I uploaded were on Facebook, Myspace, and Photobucket when I posted them … The intention here was to merely have new amateur fappability, which I apparently looked for in the wrong way.”
“Fappability” derives from the term “fap,” which—well, you can Google it.
It seems some trolls have a conscience, after all.
Photo courtesy of Jasoon