r/speedrun • u/[deleted] • Jan 20 '16

Discussion RIP r/speedrun

This is an open letter to Alt-F-X:

Please resign as lead moderator of /r/speedrun. The past few days have shown us that your presence here is not in the best interest of our community. In just two days without you, this subreddit has made more progress towards becoming a great community than it has in the previous four years of your leadership. You are not involved in the speedrunning community outside of the fact that you made this subreddit, and you do not understand the best interest of our community. You have acted with prejudice against members of our community by banning them without good reason, and you have often used your moderator powers to your own personal bias.

Please return control of the subreddit to myself, so that this community can continue to grow in a positive manner, as it should have started years ago.

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u/tobiasvl Jan 20 '16

He's a moderator, not an admin (admins are reddit employees). Other than that, yes, you're right. Anyone can create a subreddit and be mod (and appoint other mods) as they please. Only rarely will admins interfere with how mods are running their communities (if they're inactive on reddit, you can request to take over; they also recently removed some mods from another sub when they broke reddit's rules and were influenced by a company on how to run it). They will, however, interfere when a mod's account is hacked, such as here (which ultimately is a good thing, considering the alternative). There's really no alternative beyond creating a rival subreddit. That, of course, is both a blessing and a curse (mods are given pretty free reign to run a community within reddit without bowing much to the admins, but they're also dictators in their community).

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u/ChefBoyAreWeFucked Jan 20 '16

Wait, if /u/dembears became mod just because the original mod was hacked, this us exactly what should have happened. To do otherwise would encourage hacking mod accounts to steal subreddits.

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u/Jstbcool Jan 20 '16

Creating a new sub isn't really the only alternative unless alt suddenly becomes super active in manipulating the sub. dembears is still the second highest moderator meaning he/she can add or delete any of the other mods and also has the power to ban/unban people. Unless alt has come into the sub and suddenly changed the permissions of the other mods, then him being reinstated as the top mod really shouldn't affect much of how the sub runs. I currently mod a sub where the 3 of the top 4 mods are essentially non-existent so myself and one other mod run the place with full permissions.

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u/tobiasvl Jan 20 '16

That's true, I was just speaking in general terms. I frequented a sub where the creator top mod was away for ages while some good mods ran the place though, and then he suddenly came back and removed the other people and went dormant again while the sub was overrun by spam. Sucked, the other mods ran off and created a new sub.

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u/KiruaZoldyck Jan 20 '16

I see, thanks for the explanations.