However, the lack of transparency can lead to baseless speculation, which can be just as toxic, if not worse.

Case in point, during The Fappening, a large number were filled with conspiracy theories on why the administrators hadn't banned it yet before Wong's blog post, which was only made a week after the first incident.

The problem with reddit right now is that community managers are rather ineffective at actually handling the community which leads to the other employees of reddit (engineers) to finally step in. The only time when reddit does usually act is when there are some serious legal implications. This is what often leads to the reddit administrator's actions to be labeled as arbitrary.

Although, as of recently the reddit administrators started banning some of the more racist subreddits even though they didn't have any official change in policy.

The admins didn't want to ban /r/TheFappening but decided to after they got a flood of DMCA takedowns from the celebs lawyers. The sub actually broke the site because of how much traffic it was generating and that was almost 5 days before it got banned. They knew about the sub for several days and let it go because they have a hands-off policy and don't generally step in unless something drastic happens.

> Although, as of recently the reddit administrators started banning some of the more racist subreddits

Not completely sure, but IIRC those weren't banned because of racism but brigading/doxing. Which of course is bound to happen with subreddits catering to extremists.

Stackoverflow did this very well: the meta discussion is in meta.stackoverflow, which you won't see if you're not into.