Post Your Racist Opinions Here - Thread Nearly Shuts Down Reddit

Uh-oh—massively popular link-sharing site Reddit was "basically" taken down this afternoon, according to a mod. The culprit? A thread encouraging Redditors to post the "extremely controversial things" that they "honestly believe." Yep: Redditors got so excited about a safe space for their racism and misogyny that they almost shut down the site.

We've known for a long time that Reddit has an unfortunate tendency to reflect the worst of the internet. Its popular "Men's Rights" section, about which the less said the better,seems to set the tone for the site's views on gender and sexuality; users' casually-deployed racism is something of a site in-joke; and, well, there's a whole sub-Reddit dedicated to sexualized images of adolescent girls.So we somewhat knew what we could expect when a thread titled "What extremely controversial thing(s) do you honestly believe, but don't talk about to avoid the arguments?" appeared in the Ask Reddit section.

And from the first post—"I think that on average, women are worse drivers than men... Western civilization is superior in many ways to most others"—the thread delivered! We just didn't realize that Redditors were so desperate for a place where they'd be "allowed" to post their "controversial opinions" that they'd force the site's administrators to block the thread for "basically [taking] the site down."