(Accidentally cross-posted in the previous weekly. Here's my re-crosspost from ethfinance.)
This post is relevant to ethfinance, as it really underscores that we don't own our community here, Reddit does. If as a moderator your community's desires are at odds with Reddit's desires (not rules, mind you - desires), they will permanently ban you if you choose to stand with your community instead of siding with them.
As we know, a few weeks ago Reddit cut off access to the API. Many subreddits went dark for a couple days to protest. Some subreddits rightly realized that a protest with a defined end date ultimately doesn't make their voice heard, and they wanted to make their voice heard. The /r/dndmemes subreddit was one such subreddit.
Now, one of the rules made clear by the Reddit admins is that you're not allowed to label harmless posts as NSFW to try to harm Reddit's ad revenue. In my opinion, that's fair enough. Content should be properly labeled.
The members of the /r/dndmemes community, however, wanted to continue making a point without violating this rule. So in protest of the API changes, the community decided to changed their meme subreddit into a pornography subreddit. Full-on, D&D-style NSFW content. Every post was tagged NSFW, because every post was NSFW.
This afternoon, r/dndmemes received the following message from the Mod Code of Conduct account:
If you suddenly begin to post, or approve content that features sexually explicit content to your community in order to justify the NSFW label, we will immediately remove and permanently suspend moderators who have participated in this action. 3 moderators have been permanently suspended and removed from the mod team for participating in this activity already. They are not to be added back to the team under any account.
Moments later, and without further warning, the following mods were removed from the team and permanently suspended from Reddit:
u/Dalimey100
u/4cheese
u/EquivalentInflation
As part of their community action, the Reddit admins also removed two of the NSFW flairs that the community had begun using, so it was no longer possible to properly categorize or filter new posts to the subreddit. In the aftermath, due to these sudden changes the Reddit admins made against the community's will, the remaining mods have marked new submissions to the subreddit manual approval to stem the tide of now-banned NSFW content. They're now swimming in a sea of posts that follow the mods' own rules, but don't follow the new rules Reddit Inc has decided to impose on their community, and they're expected to moderate their subreddit according to Reddit Inc's imposed /r/dndmemes rules.
anon