A New Era for Reddit?

Reddit‘s top executives created a new policy to combat harassment, the New York Times first reported last week, and not all of its users are happy about it.

Spearheaded by interim CEO Ellen Pao, who recently lost a very public lawsuit against her former employer, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, over gender discrimination allegations, the new rules allow users to email site moderators, who can then remove content deemed inappropriate, unsafe, or discriminatoy. The moderators also have the power to ban those users from the site. 

This isn’t the first move that Pao has made in a bid to make Reddit a more equal website (and workplace). In January, the company released its first annual transparency report, and in March, it updated its policy to account for so-called revenge porn, in which sexually explicit media is released without the creator’s consent. Last month, Pao also announced that the company would be banning salary negotiations all together, citing research showing that women tend to be less apt at it than men are. (That policy, however, does pose potential flaws: If Reddit’s salary offers are based on an applicant’s previous salary, which may or may not have been fair, it could potentially worsen the gender pay gap over time.)

One of the greatest pieces of criticism that Pao and the other executives have received since their blog announcement on Thursday is the seemingly vague nature of the update: “It was a preemptive strike to pretend they’re transparent before screwing the userbase with completely vague rules that give the admins power to censor whoever they like or whichever group they like,” one poster writes in response. Another adds: “The definition of harassment is so vague as to be useless, as are the penalties.”

In spite of this backlash, however, Reddit claims that its policy comes in light of extensive research that it conducted this year, for which more than 15,000 redditors were surveyed: “We’ve heard a lot of complaints and found that even our existing users were unhappy with the content on the site,” Pao told the New York Times. She’s hopeful that, in addition to making Reddit a safer space for creative exchange, the new rules will also encourage more users to sign up, thus expanding its current pool of roughly 200 million regular visitors.

Pao certainly has a point, if you take into consideration that Reddit has historically become a platform for discretions including nude photo leaks, and Gamergate-related posts. To what extent the new policy is effective (or enforced) remains to be seen.