 The volunteer moderators of Reddits rblackladies community -- an online message board that currently has over 40,000 members -- wrote an open letter outlining their frustrations with the popular website in August 2014. They had pitched their message board, known as a subreddit, as a safe space for Black women, but were being deluged with hateful comments and links to racist content from anonymous accounts. They are relentless, coming in barrages, the moderators wrote. We have a racist user problem and Reddit wont take action. Several months later Alexis Ohanian, one of Reddits co-founders, joined a comment thread on rblackladies discussing the letter. Ohanian, who had recently returned to the company as its executive chairman, said protecting communities like theirs from abuse was a top priority. He solicited suggestions on how to do it, and expressed interest in an ongoing dialogue with all of the mods who signed onto the open letter. Reddit user TheYellowRose, a rblackladies moderator who helped write the letter said in a recent phone interview that Ohanians promised dialogue never materialized. To TheYellowRose, who asked to be identified only by her screen name because she is still regularly subjected to racist abuse and fears physical violence if her identity is revealed, Ohanians initial enthusiasm for the idea seemed like just another example of the companys leaders trying to say the right things without seriously confronting the ways their site harbored extremists and gave them a place to organize. Reddit has faced several potential inflection points in its approach to racism in the six years since then, but has never undertaken a full enough reckoning to satisfy its critics. Its facing another big moment in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. Once again, the pressure is coming in... 