But individuals being singled out to slander and poke fun at is not acceptable in my opinion, regardless of whether you define it as free speech or not. There's a world of difference between simply saying "I hate fat people" and putting up a specific image or video of a fat person and then gathering around to verbally abuse them. Quite happy to see that sort of behaviour banned.
Here's an example unrelated to harassment. Many people strongly disapprove of consumption of drugs, including marijuana. Reddit has a forum with 750k members who actively promote the consumption of this drug. It isn't even considered 18+ only, so reddit is ok with children subscribing to this forum. Shouldn't the promotion of acts which are illegal be banned too? Shouldn't we go after this before we go after the people who are merely insulting others?
Another way to view it: Hateful reddits are a pressure release valve caused by political correctness.
The media's political correctness and current pushes for "diversity" in tech pretty much gut normal speech in favor of giving control to outsiders. I could elaborate.
I liked that reddit bent over backwards to allow a wide variety of opinions, even ones that were ignorant or hateful. I viewed it as a noble stance.
But once upon a time, the "ugly" subreddits were ignorable and mostly self-contained. (At least to me, usually)
> that attract more and more people like that, that makes the community as a whole worse.
Yup. This trend surprised me--the recent exponential growth of some of the toxic hate subreddits. I guess I was naive. The uglier subreddits more and more frequently show up on /r/all, the users would encourage each other to post more frequently, and there was a thriving community built around the hate. It struck me as mentally unhealthy for all involved--the rapid innovating of negativity and the stoking of mild opinions into full on hatred.