The more I read this, the more I realize that I only *thought* I knew the slimy underbelly of the Internet. Thankfully, I'm at the age where that realization is not immediately followed by an urge to put on the hipwaders and go see for myself.
I've seen bits people have taken from .onion sites. I have also seen the horror that is 9gag. Both are much worse than Reddit.
Reddit operates openly and is owned by Advance Publications, a multi-billion dollar corporation. This is a child molester operating in a basement versus operating in a town square surrounded by bystanders. While they're both bad, to the first you just think "what the fuck is wrong with this person" while the second forces you to think "what the fuck is wrong with this entire community". As for 9gag, I haven't seen them do anything blatantly illegal yet, short of being criminally unfunny.
When you put it that way Reddit makes /b/ look like some kind of kitten and puppy parade. Which it is sometimes on Saturday. Then again the one time I went to Reddit I was so horrified by the sheer volume of content that I clicked out of it and proceeded to cry.
Also, 4chan and 9gag are at war because of how unfunny 9gag is and how they engage in the theft of intellectual property and memes. /b/ itself has raided 9gag a fair bit but since that incident with that movie "Smiley" things have calmed down somewhat.
Most likely because of [REDACTED].
I browse reddit because it can be genuinely entertaining, funny, or informative. It is, of course, the internet, so take everything with a grain of salt. Mostly I'm just saying, don't go hating on it because it happens to contain nasty people or topics of discussion, because even WE have that.
Remember the time with that poor elf girl?
The difference, of course, is that posting creepy fanfiction on this forum gets you banned, your thread locked, and your post forever spoken of in hushed tones as "the incident". On Reddit, posting child pornography makes you "a valued member of the community" and they'll ban anyone who says otherwise.
Now you see, those "incidents" happen because people lack the common sense to not post that kind of content on a forum like this. Then again Dwarf Fortress is the game where you can have an economy that uses every part of the kitten, so I can imagine some creepy people would be attracted to this forum. If only they would have the common sense not to be some kind of idiot and post about it on this forum. Then we wouldn't have shit like Obok Meatgod.