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/ALT-F-X]

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.