Checkmate, Atheists! Reddit Updates Default Subreddits, Gives Politics and Atheism the Boot

It’s happening! Reddit is finally doing some spring cleaning and changing their line-up of default subreddits for the first time since October 2011. Better yet, they’re removing two of the most drama-filled, off-putting, controversial areas on the whole site: /r/politics and /r/atheism. It’s a brave new world, ladies and gentlemen. Well, mostly gentlemen according to Reddit demographics.

For those who aren’t in the know, defaults subreddits are the ones that you are automatically subscribed to when you create a new account on Reddit. These recent changes to the roster won’t necessarily affect the regular Reddit user, who most likely have their own curated subscriptions. However, it will affect those with new accounts, as well as users who have been logged out for some time.

In their place, Reddit has added five official defaults:

/r/books
/r/earthporn
/r/explainlikeimfive
/r/television
/r/gifs

There are people already miffed that the addition of a subreddit with “porn” in the title might throw off some censors. Others are worried that the quality of these subs will drop considerably. Overall, however, the response appears to be pretty positive. You know, except in /r/politics and /r/atheism, of course, where regular users appear to be going through all the standard stages of grief. Which it makes for very compelling reading material that I can only really describe in GIF form:

But of course, this also leads to the inevitable question: Why get rid of /r/politics and /r/atheism? Because they’ve just weren’t good enough anymore, cupcake1713 stated on the Reddit blog.

We could give you a canned corporate answer or a diplomatic answer that is carefully crafted for the situation. But since this is reddit, we’re going to try things a bit differently and give you the real answer: they just weren’t up to snuff. Now, don’t get us wrong, there still ARE good parts about them. Overall, they just haven’t continued to grow and evolve like the other subreddits we’ve decided to add.

I can only presume that perhaps part of the problem lies in the fact that Reddit atheists still haven’t been able to answer this very important question:

He a dog has a good point there.

(via Reddit)

Meanwhile in related links

• Here’s a recipe for the perfect Reddit post
• I wasn’t kidding about those Reddit demographics
• Speaking of subreddit drama, what about /r/AdviceAnimals?