So, there is a conversation involving someone from the AskHistorians mod team and the BadHistory subreddit that is long overdue. It’s been delayed for a number of reasons, but recent matters involving BadHistory have rather brought this to a point, and to the point where I personally felt like it should be done in the open. I am primarily speaking here as me, a specific moderator of AskHistorians with my own particular opinions, and on the occasions where I speak with confidence of the AH mod team’s general opinion I’ll say so. I am not the Mysterons.

I’ll start by giving my extremely brief summary of how BH’s history has appeared from my point of view. It was first founded by AskHistorians flairs, its earliest community was almost entirely AskHistorians flairs, and it was intended as a light hearted circlejerk. This lasted for as long as it took meta communities on reddit to encounter it, and until several common strains/topics began to clearly dominate. These topics mostly involved people being utter jackasses and using incredibly poor history as their justification, often politically, and often linked to outright bigotry. BH became even more circlejerky, incredibly smug, and intensely bitter. I still feel that this was partially caused because of the parade of awful humans who provided most BH-worthy content. A decent number of the older BH members started to leave the subreddit, including some of its earlier mods.

Then, new moderators having been added, things started to change. A lot of people grumbled but the subreddit was slowly pulled away from the same topic every 5 minutes, from total circlejerk, and towards having some kind of educational platform. An IRC had emerged as a result of r/badsubhub being formed, and though it still carries that name the IRC has always been primarily composed of BH users, and is effectively the BH IRC channel. The subreddit started to get large effort posts aimed at education more than entertainment, some of which were unwieldy and probably quite boring like mine, and others of which were interesting and insightful. From my point of view the community became palpably nicer to deal with, and was consistently improving. But part of the reason that I’m making this post is that, bit by bit, it feels like BH is actually starting to become more toxic again, and rather rapidly.

Now I need to say something that sounds rather insulting; almost all of the AskHistorians moderators can’t stand the BH subreddit. This has been the case for years in some cases. Their individual reasons for dislike have always differed. Some just don’t like any kind of circlejerky community. But the common thread has always been that most AH mods associate BadHistory with that original period of incredibly toxic, bitter discourse, and they continue to see behaviour that they find incredibly smug. This is not simply a case of looking at a community with a lot of AH flairs and disapproving, this is because the crossover between the two subreddits has not always functioned positively. Some of the attitudes of that earlier toxic phase of BH found their way into the actions of some of our flaired users and commenters in AskHistorians at the time, and this is where many of our mods developed such a serious dislike of BadHistory from; it seemed to keep producing smug, cynical commenters who went to AskHistorians to try to be mean to people, not in order to help them learn. Whilst I agreed with these problems I still felt that BH had enormous potential, especially for education, which is why I’ve made such long and boring posts from time to time, and I’ve already established that I felt the subreddit improved enormously with time and care. But matters of late have left me wondering whether I was wrong, and uncomfortable with trying to justify my better opinion of BadHistory, and that’s because history is beginning to repeat.

I will be blunt once again, negative (and at times unacceptable) behaviour in BH is starting to overlap with behaviour in the AskHistorians community. It’s almost inevitable that this would be the case if toxicity in BH begins to rise again because the links between our communities continue to be very strong. Many new flaired users over the past year have come to AskHistorians via BadHistory, and many longstanding flaired users are regular participants of the BH community, myself included if we’re fair. It’s even more inevitable if this involves incidents between multiple users who are all already flaired on AskHistorians. This has happened before and it is beginning to happen more frequently.

‘Negative behaviour’, you might say, ‘that’s an incredibly ambiguous label’. Indeed it is, and so I’ll be very precise about what I mean; using IRCs linked to BadHistory or AskHistorians as an environment to engage in stupid behaviour, to insult people, as places to circlejerk about how awful a person or their pieces of content are; catty, hostile, and obnoxious behaviour towards BadHistory moderators, including when those moderators are calling people out for poor behaviour in the BH subreddit; the formation of obnoxious, quasi-circlejerk cliques who displace other discussion with exactly the same kind of childish put downs or tired memes every single time; at times people have resorted to open insults on BadHistory threads, where they can squeeze them around BH’s ruleset. The past toxic environment of BH put off more than a few people from ever visiting the subreddit again, and this recent run is beginning to do the same. It has once again helped encourage BH moderators to resign. The behaviour of individuals on the BH affiliated IRC channel has caused regular users there to leave and never come back. This has now also started happening on the AskHistorians IRC channel (which is only accessible for flaired users, sorry for anyone who tried to find it and was disappointed), and this is essentially a final straw for the AH mod team, and why I am talking partially for all of us rather than just as a private, concerned individual. These all disproportionately involve people and flaired users involved with BadHistory, which is why there is not an equivalent meta post in AskHistorians right now.

This post is mainly intended as a plea, to the subreddit as a whole, to avoid slipping back into past niches and tone. BadHistory has produced an abundance of good quality educational content in the past year and a half, and a lot of genuinely fun and light-spirited content as well. I still feel that BadHistory is better than it was, and that it can be better still, to the point where anyone accusing it of being toxic would feel extremely silly. However, if the situation deteriorates badly then I can’t say which other regulars (with their content and wit) are going to permanently depart the community, and that’s not a threat, that’s a worry.

This post is also, however, a warning. There is an inherent awkwardness in two communities sharing so many users, to the point where flair in AH has been displayed on BH usernames for over a year, when both subreddits do not share the same rulesets. Neither are the IRCs affiliated with each subreddit ones that have identical rulesets to the subreddits in question, and moderating a crossover between those two is even more awkward in the far less open lands of IRC clients. The AH mod team does not punish people for breaking rules on unrelated subreddits if they are model citizens in our own and there is no question of ill-intent. There is, however, one enormous exception to this principle, and that is where people are abusing their status on our own subreddit in other communities, or where they are deriving authority/prestige on that community by openly displaying their flaired status on AskHistorians. Flair on AskHistorians is no longer displayed on BH but much behaviour has happened under that aegis while it was there. Likewise, given how close our communities are, is BH truly an unaffiliated subreddit? I’m not so sure about that. So what exactly am I warning about? Breaking BH rules might not lead to any raised eyebrows on the AH mod team per se, neither will people be monitoring the every move of our flaired users on BH, but you had better believe that if AH flaired users do something extraordinarily stupid, offensive, or nasty that it will have consequences elsewhere. How could it not? We have also resorted to revoking the flair of those who are absolute asshats on the AH IRC before now, and if necessary we will have to start doing so again. BadHistory is no longer a consequence free area for AskHistorians flairs looking to be dicks, and IRC is not a staging ground for co-ordinating dickery on reddit. If we have to start subjectively removing people from things because we feel they are a fundamentally unpleasant person then that is what will have to happen.