Sup shitlords,

So you’ve no doubt seen the sub locked over the past 24 hours, and heard a lot of churn around Reddit on what’s going on. We want to update you, our shitlord user base, directly about what issues we’ve seen arise on this site recently and long-term. Frankly, it’s become too much for some of us who’ve been here for years to tolerate.

First, the recent issue that brought this about. Two of our moderators, who were formerly mods on another subreddit, commented on some happenings in that subreddit. That was enough to warrant a ban in that subreddit, to which they replied to it how most would when they think it’s unfair…..with a fuck you. This seemed to be enough for an admin suspension with no warning, even though this moderator had no prior valid violations. As of this post, the admin team still will not clarify with our moderator on specifically why they were banned. For the short-term, we locked the sub to express our concerns about this lack of transparency and consistency.

For the long-term, the rest of us here honestly don’t give a rat’s ass about inter-sub slapfights like what caused the ban. If any individual moderators want to chime in on that topic that were involved, they’re welcome to do so in the comments. What we are concerned about is the unfocused and lopsided admin “policy” actions against team members for quite mundane comments, at least relative to what we as a mod team see daily with complete inaction.

Hate speech has continued to grow and pervade on this entire website in countless topics…..political, gender/sexuality, race, death/rape threats to name just a few that routinely hit our moderator team, as I’m sure other similar subreddits deal with. THAT should be the primary focus of admins. To the best of our abilities over the years, we’ve tried to block that hate speech in our sub from ever-changing fronts while not making this place a complete prison of rules and groupthink. Not because we want something grand/monetary in return, but because it’s fostered friendships amongst us long-time mods and users that will hopefully long outlast our time here.

To us senior moderators, some of who’ve been here since reddit was a small website, the lack of admin support over this issue as the site has grown tenfold and the continued assault of hate speech subreddits that pop up and try to insert their agenda/stir issues with regulars here (again, without moderator tools to combat them) has caused many of us to finally throw in the towel. We have never done this for any kind of personal gain, other than fostering friendships amongst the mod team and regular users that will no doubt outlast our time here.

As a result of these longer term concerns, many of us who’ve manned the watch here for years and kept a semblance of sanity as this place has grown exponentially will be resigning and/or stepping back from actively moderating, not in protest at our users or any dumb drama shit…..but in finally tiring of the severe lack of admin tools and support for larger subs like ours that deal with the worst hate. To those who’ve thought we haven’t gone far enough in preventing hate speech, this will probably showcase how much we were quietly doing behind the scenes to stop the tide. For us, we all hope the subreddit gets fresh and similarly active leadership and that such an outcome doesn’t happen, hopefully with additional tools to combat increasing extremism. But based on the promises we’ve seen on these issues in the past several years, we won’t hold our breath.

We ask for your patience and understanding to those mods who want to stay on here, so they can continue to provide the same level of crap-tastic advice that you’ve come to enjoy over the years. Godspeed.