I'm not really part of this conversation, but my GF has previously complained that Reddit isn't worth using because "you're just scrolling down looking at cool shit, and then BAM, you get murder-rolled. [What?] It's like rickrolling, but it's a picture or video of somebody getting murdered."
Various client-side solutions to this occurred to me, like identifying domains that will host such media (gotta be just a few, right?) and null routing them on her computer, but then it turned out that she doesn't have root on her "computer", so she just quit using reddit.
What on earth subreddits is she subscribed to that this is a thing that happens at all? I think I have seen such a post roughly zero times in the last five years.
When you make an account, you auto-subscribe to the current defaults. For a long time /r/wtf was a default sub. Its pretty much murder and disfigurement porn. She's probably still seeing that. I believe /r/wtf's tenure as a default tied it with a period of a lot of new traffic, so lots of people still see /r/wtf in their feed.
Whoever decided to move /r/wtf into the defaults back then was crazy. I have a thick skin and have seen more than my share of awful things on the internet, but a lot of that content is challenging even for me, especially anything involving injured, abused, or even dead children. I can't imagine what its like for someone not already exposed to that.
I haven't seen anything like that on Reddit though. Everything is marked NSFW, unless perhaps stuff in 50/50, but even they tell you there's 50% chance that any post is something vile.
It was a default sub last year, possibly with a different mission statement. Or they were just into murder at the time. I mean, lots of popular websites are.
Various client-side solutions to this occurred to me, like identifying domains that will host such media (gotta be just a few, right?) and null routing them on her computer, but then it turned out that she doesn't have root on her "computer", so she just quit using reddit.