Reddit, an American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website with 542 million monthly visitors as of February 2018, has banned r/beertrade, one of the web’s biggest, most popular and most active hubs for craft beer fans “due to a violation of Reddit’s policy against transactions involving prohibited goods or services.”
The site had recently updated its site’s content policy with tougher measures against illegal or immoral items and services being sold on the site, including firearms, ammunition, explosives, stolen goods, currency and even sexual favors.
When asked for the reason of the ban, a Reddit employee posted the following statement:
“We considered this a lot, and this change is not due to any bad actions by these particular communities. However, due to the controlled nature of alcohol, Reddit is not built to ensure that the sales are happening legally, and so we can no longer continue to host communities solely dedicated to trading of alcohol or other controlled substances. However, communities dedicated to discussion of craft beer remain fully within the rules.”
Since the comment was published it already received hundreds of downvotes. People were mostly upset about the fact that craft beer was seen in one category together with illegal drugs, darknet trades and money laundering,. Other communities banned included r/shoplifting, r/gunsforsale, r/airsoftmarket, r/shoplifting, and r/stealing. Already in October reddit banned r/NationalSocialism, r/Nazi, r/whitesarecriminals, and r/SexWithDogs.
However, beer aficionados still have the chance to exchange their views on other forums within reddit that are not banned yet. Just look for r/beer, r/craftceer or r/beerporn …
Reddit was founded by University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005. In 2006 it was acquired by a subsidiary of Advance Publications from Staten Island, New York City. To fund the growth the San Francisco, California, based company raised additional money from leading investors and celebrities like Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Snoop Dogg, and Jared Leto with Advance Publications still being the majority stakeholder. In July 2017 reddit was valued at $1.8 billion.
