Like several other adult sites, Pornhub employs a young woman who acts as the friendly public face of the company. She goes by Pornhub Katie, and she posts hardcore JPEGs and spunky commentary to the company's Twitter account, gives secret santa gifts to random internet users, and occasionally gets in trouble for telling an off-color joke. Unsurprisingly, she's very popular on Reddit. Or was—until she invaded the site's no-masturbation subreddit.

Katie's Reddit popularity came thanks in part to a popular AMA thread about the inner workings of Pornhub, and started to wane after a prank she pulled on NoFap, Reddit's much-lampooned community of dudes who strive to give up masturbating.

NoFappers generally take up the cause either because they're legitimately addicted to porn or they're MRA dweebs who think that refraining from jerking it will somehow give them superpowers, and last year, they collectively lost their shit when Katie dared to set foot in their hermetically sealed club.

In a NoFap post about a PornHub marketing stunt that involved planting a tree for every "big wood" video watched on the site, Katie apparently began commenting in defense of the company she works for and gently taunting the fapstinent commenters. It's unclear exactly what she posted because her comments have since been deleted, but this week, a Redditor named KiraKira_ claimed that Pornhub "basically...tried to put ads in NoFap"—a subreddit full of guys who are desperately trying to avoid sites like Pornhub:

Basically, PH tried to put ads in NoFap. Katie claimed it was just a joke (questionable, imo, but definitely in poor taste) but their users were still upset about it. She went there and joked around, posted some gifs, and then someone linked her comments to BestOf. All her comments were upvoted into the hundreds and thousands while the legit NoFap users were downvoted and harassed by the brigade. From what I understand, the entire sub suffered for it for days afterward because of the trolls who decided to stick around.

Snallygaster, another Redditor, added:

Yeah, there are some actual porn addicts using that sub. Regardless of how zealous nofap can get, it's cruel to taunt addicts like that.

Those comments come from the top thread on Reddit's SubRedditDrama board—where users discuss the various micro-controversies that persist across the site's vast network of niche subreddits— which reads "Katie_Pornhub was shadowbanned." (Shadowbanning refers to banning users from posting to Reddit without letting them know they've been banned.) Inside, there's a litany of complaints.

In addition to the NoFap invasion, users are upset that Katie allegedly violated Reddit's ban on spamming and self-promotion, which asks that users not flagrantly submit links to sites "that you own or otherwise benefit from in some way." Considering that Katie's very username references the company she works for—and the obvious ways in which PornHub stands to benefit from engendering goodwill within an enormous, porn-filled and mostly male community of people who likely spend many long, lonely hours in front of their computers—this is probably a valid claim.

Ultimately, it appears that Katie may have been banned for reasons unrelated to her alleged Pornhub promotion or jokes at the expense of dick-touching teetotalers, and after a brief blackout, her account is active again.

Whether the stunt alienated the men of NoFap or Reddit at large is irrelevant. A few pissed off dudes vowing to boycott the site won't put a dent in Pornhub's huge global traffic, and Katie's chief job—just like the jobs of legions of "social media managers" and "community coordinators" at non-NSFW companies across the internet—is to keep people thinking and talking about her employer's brand. Considering that this blog post exists at all, she's doing it well.