Suggested listening while reading this recap: Ashokan Farewell

We have shared the incommunicable experience of war, we have felt - we still feel - the passion of life to its top. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The Fattening. The Red(dit) Wedding. The June Purge. Little Pao's First Pogrom. The events of June 10 and June 11, 2015 will be many things to many people. But to those who lived through it, who fought on battlelines soaked periwinkle with downvotes, those events will always be only one thing: the greatest dramatic happening in a tumultuous nine years of Reddit's existence. A roiling incident, a supreme disquiet, a riot that pitted Redditor against Redditor, brother against brother, and changed the very fabric of Reddit's existence, possibly for an entire couple months.

It saw heroes rise, and fall. It saw unlikely allies, and all too familiar villains. It saw fighting in all places, from the bustling hub of /r/all, to the smoky backrooms of the metasphere, to the quaint, quiet serenity of /r/koans. On one side: the idea that harassment should not be tolerated. On the other: the idea that free speech is a right inalienable, to be protected despite the consequences.

It was the Fattening.

It was an actual thing that happened.

The root causes of the Fattening are vast and myriad: the backlash against SJWs, GamerGate, the Tumblr/Reddit Cold War, the Imgur vs Fat People Hate debacle, all were powder kegs leading to the eventual explosion.

This recap will focus only on the events that occurred during the Fattening, and will leave speculation to the brave, future historians. The brave, and the kind of sad and a little pathetic future historians who study the Fattening and it's later repercussions.

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It began with an announcement: henceforth, the Reddit administration would be banning subreddits that engaged in behavior that violated Reddit's new harassment policy, however nebulously defined. Five subreddits were banned: hamplanethatred, transfags, neofag, shitniggerssay, and, most importantly of all: /r/fatpeoplehate, a sub with 150,000 subscribers strong.

The reaction was instant, shooting like a musket ball across the whole of Reddit. Users of all walks of life spoke quickly and loudly of censorship and oppression. Other users decried the response as feeble and wondered why other subreddits, most notably ShitRedditSays and CoonTown, were not similarly banned. Battle lines were being marked and drawn. The air sizzled electric with the possibility of war.

In the early discussions on two subreddits, KotakuInAction, and Conspiracy, we see the first signs of smoke, a prophecy of fire, wild and hot, inconsolable. Users felt fatpeoplehate deserved the ban and that little of value was lost. Many others, however, felt the subreddit had a fundamental right to speak as it saw fit. To the latter group, this was political correctness gone wild. And not the good gone wild, like /r/gonewild. The bad kind. The kind that doesn't involve naked women.

/r/fatlogic, the fatpeoplehate sister subreddit immediately went private (it is back as of right now). In threads across the Fempire, there was unanimous celebration, ShitRedditSays, most notably. Users spilled ink at a feverish rate. In /r/legaladvice, users wondered about legal recourse, but were summarily rebuffed. Entire essays extolling the virtues of free speech and decrying administrative oppression were hastily penned and published, their authors gilded. To some they were merely hilarious copypasta, to others they were the manifesto of a revolution.

And then there was war.

In the wake of the banning, alternative fat people hate subreddits spread like wildfire across a dry, Kansas prairie. Fatpeoplehate 2-9, fatpersonhate, ObesityRules, CandidHealthPolice, and many others all vied to replace fatpeoplehate as the center of anti-fat sentiments. All were quashed by the administration, banned outright, and relegated to the dregs of the Reddit's cache, never to be seen again. Their mods were shadowbanned and their users scattered and in disarray.

As all wars, this one, too, effected both innocent and guilty. /r/whalewatching, a two year old sub dedicated to watching whales, was over run by anti-fat posts, leading to it being briefly banned, then reinstated.

What happened next was an unprecedented outpouring of upvotes. Users regrouped, taking the battle to the defaults themselves. /r/Pics found itself awash in anti-fat activity, all pictures deriding fat people immediately and consistently upvoted, skyrocketing these posts to the top /r/all. Eventually the mods of /r/pics, despite reservations, banned all FPH related posts.

Major news outlets across the world now began to take notice, and word of the revolt bled into the real world. A list of those articles can be found here.

But then the war took a turn. Feeling lost and hopeless against the onslaught of administrative and moderator action, fat people haters took up arms and went after that very administration, most notably it's leader and figure-head, Ellen Pao. /r/punchablefaces went private after hundreds of pictures expressing the desire to punch Pao right in the face were upvoted by protestors. Two out of three mods were shadowbanned, losing their karma and any remaining gold months forever.

From that wellspring, a flood of anti-Pao sentiments began. Pao hate subs flourished on /r/all. Insults, threats, requests for Pao to resign all stood stalwart on the top of /r/all. One post requesting users not gild posts in protest was gilded over two dozen times.

The war had reached a fever pitch, holding hostage the very website on which it was being waged. All were now embroiled in it, and none could escape. In little /r/koans, a moderator also took up arms. Although his subreddit was a small, almost private, endeavor, he henceforth tendered his resignation. The Fattening was inescapable.

But although a candle that burns at both ends burns twice as bright, so too does it burn twice as fast. Exhausted from outrage, from fighting, from war, users began to abandon the front late June 11, 2015. The most embroiled and passionate users fled what they believed to be persecution by the hundreds. Voat.co, a Reddit alternative that promised freer speech and less oversight, was so overrun that it's servers crashed. Users in 4 and 8chan were turned away at the gates. Yet shouts of "This is the Digg migration part 2!" echoed in comments everywhere.

In gaming subreddits, talk of the Steam Sale began to peak through top posts like the first rays of sunlight after a dark and terrible storm. An actor had passed away. There were memes to make. Reddit had business as usual to tend to.

And peace, long fought for, reigns again in sleepy subreddits across Reddit, although some small embers of discontent still burn, threatening to emerge again like a revenant, haunting us all.

What consequences does The Fattening hold? What results will follow? Was this the petulant bleating of so many man-children? The tantrum of a child who has his toys taken by his parents? Or was it something more? Something grander? A fundamental shift in the discourse on the Internet, perhaps, or the portents of a rise of a new "Front Page of the Internet"?

Only time will tell.

Mah dearest Annabelle,

These last many days I have kept the memory of you close to my bosom. The cursed Fat Haters who have harassed us lo these many months were delivered a mighty blow. However, their fury has spread wide and fight has been exceedingly buttery but I am certain of victory though it may be ever so long in the fighting. The Admin corps is resolute and stand proudly. Anabelle I am weary and the fight has been ever so long. The thought of you sustains me as I gaze upon the front page. Give my love to little James. With the help of Providence I pray I shall return soon.

With the fullest of my devotion,

/u/CupBeEmpty

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Updates

The ex-FPH mod team is currently doing an AMA in /r/casualiama.