How to Change the Culture of a Subreddit: Looking Back at the Cringe Subs (2016)

Excerpt for people who use the comments as a preview since it's kind of long:

"My view of the main problem was this: fighting against the userbase to stamp out bullying was a waste of time. The problem was the userbase itself. We would wait for a person to make a really offensive comment before taking action, but another would quickly take their place. Over and over and over again, it was like playing whack a mole with bullies. And there was no end in sight - the sub was still growing extremely quickly (for a time, /r/cringepics was in the top 20 fastest growing subs, beating out several defaults).

My solution: in order to change the culture of the sub, you have to take away what attracts them there in the first place. Nothing else will work. In the case of the cringe subs, we figured out the most common link between all of the posts we thought were bad - they almost always involved something being done by a single person. No social situation or interaction, just one person "being weird." Oftentimes the person "being weird" is even enjoying themselves. So our solution was simple: mandate that every single post had to directly involve at least 2 people in some kind of interaction. This would instantly kill off most of the content that was popular at the time, and undoubtedly cause a shit-storm of controversy."