Since yesterday’s announcement that several “harassing” subreddits, including r/FatPeopleHate, had been banned from the website, Reddit has seen a massive backlash from trolls that are overwhelming the site with dozens of replacement subreddits that are being pushed to the frontpage.

The new subreddits included names like “FatPeopleHate2,” “FatPeopleHate3,” and…well, you get the idea. Cleverness is not their strong suit. There have also been multiple subreddits created for the purpose of criticising Reddit’s interim CEO, Ellen Pao, whom many blame for the new policies.

These users are not only swarming across dozens of new subreddits, but they are also invading other popular subreddits like r/pics and r/worldnews. Several users have stated that they are upvoting FatPeopleHate content and downvoting everything else in order to overload the frontpage with their posts.

Reddit faced a similar albeit smaller backlash last year after the site issued a rule to stop users from posting pictures from “The Fappening,” a massive leak of nude celebrity photos that included actresses like Jennifer Lawrence and Kirsten Dunst.

Reddit can’t really do anything about it

Reddit has yet to make an official statement regarding the backlash, but the site faces a tough challenge in how to wrangle its user base back to some semblance of sanity. It will also be difficult for the site to prevent this sort of behavior in the future without drastically changing some of its core policies.

The only way Reddit could really prevent banned subreddits from being recreated moments later is by locking down the way they are made in the first place. Currently, any user can create a new subreddit with about as much effort as it takes to set up a new email. You simply pick a name, choose a few options, and hit create.

Stopping an onslaught of subs like r/FatPeopleHate115651 would require manual review and approval of each new community. This would completely change the way Reddit’s community-driven content works works and might just be the change that finally pushes users away, even those who are opposed to the types of subreddits that were banned.

Whether or not Reddit will be able to move past this latest flame war, one thing is clear: Banning immature subreddits right when schools were letting out for the summer was a bad idea.

Photo by Eva Blue