GIFs of John Oliver

Hello yet again, r/GIFs!

Things have never looked better (or sexier) here, have they? Honestly, the moderation team was a bit skeptical about only allowing media featuring John Oliver… but that’s what you voted for, and we have to admit that you were right to do so!

Unfortunately, it turns out that we overlooked a small problem.

According to Reddit’s policies, “content that contains nudity, pornography, or profanity […] should be tagged as NSFW.” Since Reddit has officially stated that we are expected to “ensure people have predictable experiences on Reddit by properly labeling content […] that is graphic, sexually-explicit [sic], or offensive,” this democratic approach to tagging is putting the community in jeopardy. Additionally, since a distressingly large number of people have expressed that they are offended by the sight of John Oliver, we are forced to conclude that media featuring the man is regarded by some as “offensive.”

Now, we really, really don’t want to mark r/GIFs as being NSFW. Doing so would mean that we were no longer discoverable, that we would no longer show up in Reddit’s main feeds, and that millions of people would be deprived of John Oliver’s presence on their screens. It would also have the effect of keeping Reddit from showing advertisements alongside our posts, which we feel would be unfair. (After all, Reddit generously hosts our little community, and we’d hate to adversely affect them by making an immediate, detrimental change to that arrangement.) However, unless things here change, we may have no choice.

We therefore have two simple requests for you:

• Please do not use any (a NSFW link follows this parenthetical) profanity in non-NSFW threads.

• If you post anything that could possibly offend anyone, please tag it as being NSFW.

As we do not have time to put this to a vote (since Reddit is moving very quickly against communities that it deems to be problematic), we are pleading for all of r/GIFs to behave in a responsible manner. The continued inclusion of profanity or offensive content in non-NSFW threads will leave us with no option but to mark the entire subreddit as NSFW, which – as previously stated – we do not want to do.

Before we sign off, we want to address some potential concerns:

Q: Will making r/GIFs a NSFW subreddit result in the moderators being removed?