Pikabu

Submission 18,460

About

Pikabu (Пикабу) is a Russian social news aggregation website that ranks content based on a scoring system determined by user votes, bearing many similarities to Reddit. In April 2019, a significant part of Pikabu user community migrated to /r/Pikabu subreddit following imposed restrictions on NSFW content and discontent with the moderation policy on the website.

History

On April 4th, 2009, Russian enterpreneur Maksim Khryaschev launched Pikabu.ru,^[1] a social news aggregation website based on user-generated content inspired by Reddit.^[2] The website allows its users to post and rate content, with the highest-upvoted posts appearing higher in Pikabu subcommunities and on its main page.

Features

Pikabu consists of several subcommunites such as News, Comics, Science etc., with the website users encouraged to upload and rate content, which may include images, news links, text posts and other types of user-generated submissions. Posts which accumulate large amounts of upvotes are featured highter in their respective communities, with the hightest-upvoted submissions also featured on the main page of the website.

Each submitted post contains a comment section, with each submitted comment containing a subsection for its own responses in a similar vein to Reddit.

Highlights

2019 Reddit Migration

In August 2017, Pikabu included additional unannounced restrictions in its NSFW content policy, with users reporting shadowbans and removals of certain softcore NSFW content, tagged on the website as #клубника.^[3]^[4]^[5]

On November 25th, 2017, Pikabu bot account Uspeli was launched, scrapping all content tagged #клубника on the website and reposting some of it to PikabuUspeli groups in VK social network and Telegram messenger.^[6]

On April 17th, 2019, PikabuUspeli Telegram channel announced that Pikabu moderation team adjusted their anti-NSFW content tactic by treating #uspeli tag as a tag calling for moderator attention, preventing the NSFW content being scrapped by PikabuUspeli in time. In retaliation, Pikabu users spammed the #uspeli tag under non-NSFW content, clogging the moderator feed. Multiple users who used the tag under non-NSFW content were subsequently banned by the moderation team.^[7]

On April 18th, 2019, a Pikabu moderator made a clarification post explaining the moves against NSFW content with an attempt to abide with Google Play application policy after the Pikabu App was removed from Play Market in late Feburary 2019.^[8] The post gained over 1300 downvotes in six days.

The new moderation policy prompted multiple posts critisizing the current state of the website.^[9]^[10]

Following the April events, multiple Pikabu users migrated to /r/Pikabu Russian-speaking subreddit, created on April 27th, 2012.^[11] The subreddit features custom CSS theme adjusted to better correspond to Pikabu user interface. On April 22nd, 2019, /r/Pikabu moderator team announced that additional subreddits will be created for Politics, NSFW content, Pets, Anime and potentially other types of content.^[12]