55 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
Why couldn't they just unsubscribe from it on their main account?
Or are you referring to people who normally didn't have an account, so they made one just to filter it out? Sorry, I haven't been around here for that long.
Comment by Booty_Bumping at 26/05/2019 at 21:30 UTC
90 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I think the purpose was to lower the number of people subscribed to it compared to the other default subreddits, as a form of protest, i.e. /r/pics, /r/funny, /r/videos etc would have very close to 1,100,000 subscribers while /r/atheism would have an anomalously low number like 280,000. Which seemed to be the situation back in October 2011, according to wayback machine.
But yeah, also to filter it out from the homepage.
Comment by lifelongfreshman at 15/07/2019 at 18:48 UTC
32 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I'm a lot late to the question, but your second one is the right one. People would normally get linked to reddit and browse it without an account, but if you didn't have an account then you were just shown the defaults on the front page. If you were annoyed by r/atheism - which, if you go to the faces of atheism post on this subreddit[1], it's easy to understand why - and wanted to get rid of it, the only way to do so was to make an account and unsubscribe.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/comments/38i8se/the_faces_of_atheism/