this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2025
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What? What did the moderator of r/jailbait do now?
That one always rung a big hollow to me because of the timeframe of it. At the time he was made a mod there, invites didn't exist. Folks could just be added to subs- it was actually a method for trolling. At the time, I could add Steve to r/SteveLovesDiddlingKids, for example, and he'd have no say in it. They changed it to an invite system after a subreddit called r/CrabBucket heavily abused it to force folks to stay.
That said, one can quite readily say that spez implicitly supported the jailbait subreddit when he left it up for several years knowingly (Including it being a subheader for reddit on google searches, and it getting nominated for subreddit of the year along with several votes for it.) and only got rid of it when Anderson Cooper did a report on CNN about it.
That's absolutely hilarious.
spez did not work at reddit between 2009 and 2015.
On one hand yeah in that timeframe, on the other hand it's not like his homies weren't there. Further, subreddits came to exist in 2006, and people could make their own in 2008, so he had a year'ish of r/jailbait existing to do anything about it, and chose not to.
I don't especially want to be in the position of defending either spez or r/jailbait, but I was on Reddit at the time and I do think I should explain how 2008 was a different time on the web.
There had been a number of attempts to censor and age-gate the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s. People involved in creating internet tech and building its culture were almost universally against anything that even smelled like censorship. Much of the early userbase migrated from Digg in response to Digg censoring a leaked DRM key. The only sitewide rule on Reddit was "don't break Reddit".
When r/jailbait finally did get banned in 2011 and Reddit's first content policy was imposed, that decision was unpopular among Redditors even though most thought sexualizing young teenagers was disgusting. It signaled a change to what Reddit was, and people rightly feared that it would lead to significantly more restrictions. Now I have to enforce a rule on r/flashlight that people can't sell flashlights designed to be attached to guns, and I don't want to make or enforce such a rule.