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Reddit has been working to clean up communities on its website and that includes trade ones. The company updated its policies to ban the trade of drugs, firearms, explosives, stolen goods, services with “physical sexual contact,” counterfeits, and personal information. Due to this change, Reddit has banned a several subreddits that are either directly trading these goods or were clearly enabling these exchanges, including r/stealing, /darknetmarkets and r/gunsforsale.
Reddit makes note that it will not take responsibility for transactions on the goods that are allowed to be offered on their website. Reddit was “not intended to be used as a marketplace,” and it’s on you if you want to conduct deals on the platforms.
The company said that the bans towards affected communities wasn’t prompted by any specific actions on the communities part, and won’t take any action against communities where trades aren’t the focus. Safe to say though, companies would rather not be accused of having features that allow for questionable behavior and may possibly lead to tragedies. The company doesn’t want to deter advertisers worried their campaigns might end up showing to drugs and guns. What the company might lose in angry users it may make up for it ad sales.
