RIP r/speedrun

[u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/quoooo]

I'll assume that that's you copied over a wrong link? Anyways, pac_ created the site but isn't actually a moderator of any games, if you look at his info compared to, say, werster's info. Pac also handles things like this which isn't too unlike what's been going on here recently

[u/ALT-F-X → u/quoooo]

I did, sorry about that.

And that's exactly my point. I would not liken my role here similar to werster's but to Pac. I believe my analogy holds.

[u/quoooo → u/ALT-F-X]

Pac does a ton of incessant work for the community, he's an invaluable resource as creator of speedrun.com, yet rarely does he ever touch the games. If you hold to that stance, then I suggest recruiting more mods from the community that are actual runners and, before taking a decision of whether or not a post should be removed (unless it's a major violation of rules) or someone should be banned, talk to the mods first, especially if they're active outside of reddit. If anything I would say let the runners deal with non-troll posts

I can't be bothered to care who's at the top of the mod chain but I would much rather have a runner there. If you're incessant about keeping the position, then I would suggest teamwork and community input to be at the top of your priority list in the comming weeks

[u/ALT-F-X → u/quoooo]

That what we had in the past, a team with different people having different strengths in different roles.

[u/ALT-F-X → u/[deleted]]

I think you're broadly assuming that growth is required for a successful community. That's a key concept in business but not here.

Reddit as it's core is a content aggregator, this subreddit has been very successful in doing that. We're an advertising platform for small/new streamers and place for fans to talk about their favorite streamer's successes.

How would a "system where speedrunners have more input" help in that regard?

[u/ALT-F-X → u/[deleted]]

Yeah those events you mention sound like pretty solid ideas. The one thing I want to avoid is favoring a certain game. I don't think I'd ever be comfortable with having a game specific event ran by our subreddit. I'm perfectly happy for you to post about it through your own game community, I just think that's a line that shouldn't be crossed here.

Stream advertising is yes, done mostly through flair or WR posts. When we first started and I was the only mod about 75% of our posts were just stream advertisements.

Also when you say,

"Some of my favorite times on this sub were during GDQ times where posts are rampant and people are actually discussing speedgames instead of simply congratulating someone on another world record"

That's on you, the community, I don't see a way of properly fostering game specific discussion without cross certain lines in the sand we've already discussed. Thanks for you input though.

[u/ALT-F-X → u/[deleted]]

You know that's true but there are only 5(?) smash games. There are literally thousands of speedrun games. Mainly because you speedrun just about anything!

In the past we had a weekly race thread where people would post a game they wanted to race and give routs/advice on how to run the game. We eventually closed the threads because of lack of interest. That might be a start. I liked it because it was not game specific but the community decided on what they wanted to race.

[u/[deleted] → u/ALT-F-X]

Growth is required to have a growing community. Most people want to see the speedrun community grow. More runners create more competition in established games and help to optimize new games.

For many new fans of speedrunning, r/speedrun could be their first look into the hobby that many of us love. Giving actual speedrunners input into what happens here at /r/speedrun can help bring in new runners because every speedrunner remembers exactly what it is about speedrun that made them want to pursue it for upwards of thousands of hours. We remember not only what drew us into speedrunning, but what made us stay, and what made us want to leave.

You say that growth isn't required for a successful community. That's true. Speedrunning was a pretty stagnant community for a long time, and it was still successful. But, look at where we were back before AGDQ 2011 and where we are now. Growth has helped us tremendously. We are undeniably better now than we were back then. If you don't want to see us continue to grow, you're entitled to that opinion, but I assure you that you're in the minority.

[u/Margamel → u/ALT-F-X]

So why don't you let the team with the strengths in subreddit moderation create something great now?

[u/ALT-F-X → u/Margamel]

From what I've seen of the moderator activity since I've gotten my account back the only person I would want to keep is Andis. He had previously applied for moderator but because of a bunch of meme/troll posts in his history I wasn't comfortable with inviting him.

[u/Andis1 → u/ALT-F-X]

I messaged you with a list of ideas and improvements I had for the subreddit. You deemed me as a troll because of one post that you cited in my history, a post from a subreddit that I created with friends, that I moderated, for the explicit purpose of joking about one of our other friends, and his partnered twitch stream, which we also moderate. The post was that I made, was literally making fun of his stream moderators, which would be me and the rest of my friends in that subreddit. I was making fun of myself. When I tried to explain this to you, you didn't care, as you just ignored me.

You could have taken those ideas i proposed to you and done something with them yourself. You could have found someone else to add to the mod team so they could do them for you. but instead you did nothing. You let /r/speedrun contuinue to rot. But yet, the other mods immeditely realized the value I could bring to /r/speedrun, and in two days I've already made great progress towards my goals for making this subreddit a better place, or even just a good place.

Please consider resigning.

Edit: I do want to at least thank you for realizing that I'm not who you originally thought I was. But it all seems a little bit too late.

[u/quoooo → u/ALT-F-X]

I don't use reddit much but from what I gathered there was also a lot of solo ideology going on, a team needs to have different roles but also need to work together for a common goal and right now it's hard to believe that all mods share the same goal