The problem is that absent any cues for affinity, anonymous communities will rally around their aversion to "the other." Negative emotions are much more natural to express in an anonymous forum so you develop communities around things people are against just as easily as things people are for.

This leads to a bigger problem: when your community favors anonymity and antagonism over identity and empathy, the general character of your community will become anonymous and antagonistic.

I've been discussing this problem with admins since 2008. Anyone with the slightest insight into the sociology of the Internet can demonstrate that an anonymous community based on an approval system (which is what upvotes and downvotes are) will grow meaner over time, even disregarding growth. Yet Reddit has done very little to backstop against the descent into hate.

They had a chance when they bought RedditGifts. That was a community based around giving and exchange. However, they never integrated the first thing about it, never built exchanges around subreddits, communities or anything else, never attempted to use it to turn Redditors from anonymous things to hate into people likely to give you pencil sharpeners and manga novels.

And now that ship has sailed.

The truly ironic thing is that by choosing this hill to die on, this windmill to tilt at, they're enrolling their community in demonstrating just how vociferously they hate the obese. Any casual user that checks /r/all will discover (1) Reddit has little to no ability to police its community (2) that community is vile and repulsive.

But hey. They got their blog post.