this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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idk what jailbait is. And do not want to know lol.
I put what little I know about it inside a spoiler tag
spoiler
It used to be a subreddit related to... very young girls? My understanding is it means by taking the bait (=using the subreddit) you risk going to jail. So essentially a place catering to pedophiles. I think the sub disappeared before I even discovered Reddit, so I don't know exactly if users were posting pictures or something elseIt was a subreddit where redditors would post pictures of underage girls. The images weren't outright pornographic, they were images some of the members took of unsuspecting girls in public or other locations(I remember there was a teacher posting pictures of his students) or images the girls posted themselves on various social media. Some were suggestive some weren't but all of them were leered over and discussed by creeps with language that should never used towards minors.
At some point the subreddit came into the attention of Anderson Cooper which run a segment on CNN about it. Even then Reddit refused to ban the subreddit citing "free speech". Eventually one of the people on the subreddit posted a picture of a minor and said he had naked pictures of her which created a feeding frenzy of creeps asking him for those pictures. This finally made Reddit ban the subreddit.
The guy that created the subreddit, Violentacrez, was also the "victim" of an expose by Gawker who found out his real life identity. Reddit tried protecting him by banning links to Gawker when the article came out. Before all that Reddit gave him an award and various redditors voted him as the best moderator or some shit like that. Besides /r/jailbait he was running a lot of other questionable subreddits.
When I encounter teenagers who use reddit I tell them to look up "subreddit of the year 2008" just to gross them out.
Priceless. Doing the lords work
I removed it from the post because allegedly reddit had a feature were you could add anyone to any sub Reddit as moderator and someone added him. Doesn't change the fact he allowed the sub to exist and didn't get it banned until news coverage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communities#Jailbait
I remember when this happened. Violentacrez himself showed up in one of the threads that didn't get nuked and tried to defend himself. I remember his (heavily down-voted) comments all being surrounded by dozens and dozens of [deleted] comments — presumably people attacking him for being a pedo piece of shit.
I'd never heard of the guy before, but I was so disgusted by the story and by his attempts to justify himself that I went back through weeks of his old posts, down-voting everything.
The next day, I came back to a week-long temp ban from Reddit for vote manipulation. Fuckers.
Thanks for the writeup
I'm not saying I agree with it, but this is the actual meaning of the word:
Spoiler
The term jailbait existed long before the subreddit and is used to refer to underage girls that are sexually attractive, therefore they are "baiting" you to go to jail by having sex with them.Oh, and the posts on the subreddit were non-nude photos of underage girls the posters thought were attractive. It was very gross.
ah ok thanks
For some reason I subscribed to your definition IRL, but thought it meant "of age, doesn't look like it", which I suppose is how porn sites use it.
Not to defend it but people have a bit of selective bias here as it was not "very young girls" but <18. Still nasty but it was not out right full pedo shit and more geared to cringe teen culture at the time of "I'm 18 but this 17 year old is jail bait". Then the subreddit became a big free speech topic and people straight up started posting young teens to really push the topic which proved reddit's free speech stance wrong and they banned the subreddit.
Just to note, at the time anyone could be made a moderator without their approval, so that alone is not demonstrating his support for that subreddit.
Allowing it to continue was his implicit support of it. He was well aware of what they were doing, and only acted when it became a PR issue.