On Wednesday, the social link-posting website Reddit closed five of its online communities under a new anti-harassment program led by interim chief executive Ellen Pao.

They said they will put communities out of action that attack people. However, they will disable communities that attack people but permit with content many find offensive.

The decision was made after reddit surveyed thousands of its users, who said that they would not recommend the site to friends as didn't want to expose them to hate and offensive content.

The website's administrators took action by deleating five subreddits, which break the rules based on their harassment of individuals.

The most famous among those five is 'fatpeoplehate', which had over 5,000 subscribers, followed by 'hamplanethatred', 'transfags', 'neofag' and 'shitniggerssay'.

In a blog post on Reddit, Pao and two other company leaders said, "We will ban subreddits that allow their communities to use the subreddit as a platform to harass individuals when moderators don't take action. We're banning behavior, not ideas".

The website conducted a survey involving 15,000 users while announcing its definition of harassment. The survey revealed the topmost reason not to recommend Reddit is because they want to avoid exposing friends to hate and offensive content.

The forum's admins have decided that banning evil subreddits is the only way to deal with the problem. However, a number of users are extremely unhappy with the development.

Some consider these bans as a form of censorship, while others believe that this is just as an excuse to clean up Reddit and make it more agreeable to advertisers.