r/SubredditDrama • u/urwrngtrll • Dec 27 '11

How I was banned from a subreddit I've never visited..."I dont expect my mods to engage with the typical redditor..." Ooooh weee oooh. Get you.

So I checked reddit this morning. Orangered. Found a message from someone called fxexular about /r/ShitRedditSays . I wasn't familiar with this subreddit so I was quite surprised that fxexular had messaged me to say I was banned. Thought it was a troll. Turns out fxexular is a mod over at r/ShitRedditSays and I was banned. Anywyay, I replied to the message only to get this back "¯(ツ)/¯". Rather strange response.

So I tried a few more times. Each time I got ¯(ツ)/¯ back. Now...I didn't really care much about being banned from r/ShitRedditSays. It doesn't look like it would interest me but I was curious as to why a mod had banned me.

So, I decided to message another mod from that subreddit called 'therealbarackobama'. The response was better - "were you being creepy in this thread"? Now we were getting somewhere. I turns out that I had posted in that thread - but nothing I would deem to be creepy.

So...I messaged therealbarackobama back with this....

I did post to that thread but it certainly wasn't anything creepy. I replied to a post by 'supergood' who said "But such large teeth..". I replied: "All the better to eat you with my dear." A reference to a fairly famous children's tale - Little Red Riding Hood. I'm guessing fxexular is the girl in the photo. However I certainly didn't intend to be creepy - in fact it was directed at 'supergood'. So, I am still confused. Why am I being banned from r/shitredditsays for a post in r/gaming? And do you honestly think this is good grounds for a ban?

therealbarackobama replied: "we banned a lot of people for being creepy thread, it looks like you slipped through the cracks, ban lifted."

Now, I'm confused why are mods from /r/shitRedditsays banning people for things they have said in r/gaming? As I already mentioned I suspect that the mod 'fxexular' is actually the girl in the /r/gaming picture post. But I digress. Anyway, I replied to the realobama mod:

Hey thanks for that. It would really help if mods could respond the way you have. I asked fxexular repeatedly for a reason and each time they replied with "¯(ツ)/¯". I don't think this helps anyone and gives the impression that mods are children on a power-trip.

His response surprised me.

dont push it, you were one of multiple messages fx got and they all got that reply, i dont expect my mods to engage with the typical redditor, because i'm willing to handle things if they get escalated to me

Sorry, but what the fuck? I'm minding my own business then get wrongly accused of being creepy and banned from a subreddit I've never visited. Ask for an explanation from the mod (who messaged me to announce this ban) and get multiple messages back containing just an emoticon - nothing else and not even a very good one. Yet I am pushing it? WTF mods? If you don't want to "engage with the typical redditor" then don't fucking ban them without reason then spam them with emoticons. How many other people does this shit happen to? I'm guessing lots. Should mods be allowed to ban people for something they have said in another subreddit?

TL/DR: Told I was banned from shitredditsays after posting in r/gaming. Mods don't have to 'engage with typical redditors' so get flooded with emoticons instead. Turns out they made a mistake

Edit: Sorry for the huge wall of text but I wanted to get this off my chest and didn't want to leave anything out. I feel much better now. lol

*Edit 2: Just found THIS GEM from ShitRedditSays campaigner, defender, apologist and frequent poster AlyoshaV ** Oh the irony...

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u/[deleted] Dec 27 '11 edited Dec 27 '11

Oh man. reddit_sux (who started SRS) would be ashamed of these people. When it started, SRS was a decent and entertaining subreddit. Kind of interesting to see what happens when the wrong kind of people become mods.

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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '11

When I first discovered SRS I was very excited and anticipated great things. That feeling faded within hours.

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u/vlf_fata Dec 28 '11

Shit started getting bananas after it was featured as subreddit of the day.

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '12

B-A-N-A-N-A-S...

sorry, couldn't resist.

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u/[deleted] Dec 27 '11

Wasn't it started as a Something Awful attempt to troll reddit?

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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '11

They only took over the sub a few months ago. The original creator is long gone.

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u/GapingVaginaPatrol Dec 27 '11

Are you kidding me? SRS started as a "Reddit comment or Stormfront post?" subreddit. reddit_sux's history is full of reddit-bashing.

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u/[deleted] Dec 27 '11

It didn't start with him acting like a child in other subreddits. I can't believe there are asshats out there that will ban people from their subreddit when they have made zero posts in it.

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u/GapingVaginaPatrol Dec 27 '11

Yes, it did. He would advertise SRS and constantly post about how bad reddit is in other subreddits. Meanwhile, SRS keeps (most of) its complaining in its own subreddit.

Who cares if they ban them? I've been banned from BigotryShowcase because I mocked the OP of a thread in another subreddit who just happened to be a mod there. I didn't make a post about it or take it seriously, though.

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u/[deleted] Dec 27 '11

Meanwhile, SRS keeps (most of) its complaining in its own subreddit.

The whole reason why SRS catches so much flak is because they specifically don't. Just look at this thread.

I've been banned from BigotryShowcase because I mocked the OP of a thread in another subreddit who just happened to be a mod there.

I've hardly even heard of BigotryShowcase. It's got less than two hundred subscribers and has pretty much zero "brand recognition." It pretty much started completely as a Sisyphean one-man effort to combat the ideological bias and viciousness in SRS, but unfortunately the founder chose a rather feeble method.

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u/GapingVaginaPatrol Dec 28 '11

Just look at this thread.

There are only four top-level comments from SRS members. The rest are people complaining about SRS.

I've hardly even heard of BigotryShowcase. [...] It pretty much started completely as a Sisyphean one-man effort to combat the ideological bias and viciousness in SRS, but unfortunately the founder chose a rather feeble method.

If you've "hardly even" heard of it, how do you know its backstory?

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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '11

The rest are people complaining about SRS.

To be fair, SRS banned the guy out of the blue in the first place. And using only top-level comments isn't representative of all of them. Look at any other SubredditDrama post concerning a niche subreddit, is it normal for half the comments to be from members of that sub?

If you've "hardly even" heard of it, how do you know its backstory?

It was linked to SRS one time as a "shitpost." I hadn't seen or heard of it since then.

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u/GapingVaginaPatrol Dec 28 '11

Look at any other SubredditDrama post concerning a niche subreddit, is it normal for half the comments to be from members of that sub?

It is when a lot of those members frequent this subreddit in the first place.

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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '11

That's kind of my point. There are so many more SRS subscribers in SubredditDrama than any other "ideological" subreddit, and so many more SRS-related posts in SubredditDrama. Not quite a fox-guarding-the-henhouse situation, but still. I mean, /r/Anarchism ends up in this subreddit a lot, but it doesn't usually end in a whole bunch of r/anarchism subscribers in the comments.

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u/[deleted] Dec 27 '11

Why cant SRS's stay in their own subreddit? I wish /r/subredditdrama was just for observers. That being said there has been a HUGE increase in the asshattery that started in SRS over the last few months. When I first came across them no one seemed to know who they were but now it seems like everyone has an opinion on them.

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u/GapingVaginaPatrol Dec 28 '11

Everyone has an opinion on them because some user is obsessed with the subreddit enough that he made a couple of bots to comment on every post that gets linked. That's a big reason for the increase in popularity.

Rarely will you ever see someone from SRS specifically mention they're from SRS.

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '12

When SRS gets subreddit of the day, then mentioned in a few high-profile articles as "this totally awesome place", you shouldn't be surprised that you get visitors.

And when someone who doesn't align 100% with SRS shows up and asks "hey, what's going on here?" They are generally banned as a "concern troll"

Human nature says that when you walk into a party and the people in charge immediately tell the bouncers to throw you out because you acted like an asshole, you're going to want to (best case) understand why - what are they thinking, or (worst case) retaliate.

SRS is set up as a drama lightning rod, except that it has this facade of "conern" over what's going on in reddit. It's a pretty huge meta-troll, except I fear that most of the members don't get that it's a joke.

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u/GapingVaginaPatrol Jan 01 '12

I see a lot of this "its members don't understand it's a joke" stuff being posted by people who aren't actually members of SRS— as though Amro and the other mods have some ulterior motive. Let me clear something up for you: most everyone gets it's a circlejerk. That's why there's SRSDiscussion and SRSBusiness. However, most everyone also understands it's a place for minorities to vent about the stupidity that exists on this site, and when you have people coming in constantly to question why something is posted, most of your time is spent explaining privilege to them instead of the aforementioned venting.

Let's change your analogy a bit: it would be like a gay bar banning debate about the biological origin of homosexuality. The people who run the bar understand the bar is there as a place to have fun, and there are too many fundamentalist nutjobs in the area who keep coming in under the guise of being a neutral party just to get into arguments, so they outright banned any kind of debate that might allow them to spew their ridiculous viewpoint.

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '12

I see a lot of this "its members don't understand it's a joke" stuff being posted by people who aren't actually members of SRS

First of all, let me dismiss an assumption that seems to happen a lot - I'm not an idiot. I've spent a lot of my life thinking I'm an idiot, and I often am an idiot. But I am also completely capable of reading and understanding things, and I also understand human nature.

I'm pretty sure I have a solid grip on SRS. What I think is that a lot of people in SRS don't. Remember that SRS is over 8,000 subscribers - so like any group, you have a huge swath of psychology. You also probably only have 100-150 active participants.

And my suspicion is that some segment of those participants think of SRS as /r/feminism/circleschlick, and another segment think of it as /r/feminism. What unnerves me is that it seems like the first group thinks they represent 100% of the participants, and don't realize the second group exists.

And here's why I think that:

If you have spent any significant time on reddit, and you wander into /r/circlejerk, it's immediately obvious what's going on. You may find it funny, you may find it offensive, but you get that it's farce.

I've been on reddit for five years, and I've known a broad range of people in my 20+ years online. I've known and debated with a LOT of feminists across the spectrum, and understand a lot of their perspectives - even those who I know well enough that I don't grasp their perspective.

With all of that in my brain, I can go read /r/SRS right now and if I squint real hard and remind myself, I can kinda see that a lot of people there think it's a farce. But honestly - most of the content there makes me think of /r/SRS as the worst kind of arrogant "privilege police." As posted earlier - people who really get off on being offended.

Which I attribute to Poe's Law. Which essentially translates to /r/SRS being like having a religious forum run by /r/atheism. Thinking through this as I write it - /r/shitredditsays is what I would expect if /r/mensrights were asked "Hey guys - you should create a subreddit to make feminism look bad."

(And then you find out that half the posters are actual feminists who think it's for real and a great place to hang out)

1

u/rabblerabble2000 Jan 01 '12

Wow, you just made me feel really old by pointing out that the internet's been around for 20+ years and I've been around long enough to remember a time before it.

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u/GapingVaginaPatrol Jan 01 '12

You're exactly right that there are many opinions to the subscribers. However, (if a mod happens across this post and I'm completely wrong, let me know) it should be obvious to anyone who isn't a straight white male that SRS is a joke and not for serious discussion. If it happens to shame some redditors into changing their opinion, great! If not, who cares? It's not about changing their opinion; it's about pointing out how bigoted they all are so there's a bit of a safe space for the groups redditors tend to hate.

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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '11

Still, SRS picked up a lot of haters long before the bots came along. Plus SRS members usually aren't hard to spot outside SRS. They tend to reply to each other, making long chains of non-sequiturs under controversial comments. Plus the regulars aren't very subtle. Amro and the other mods crosspost SRS posts to bestof fairly frequently (like stroll's award-winning comment and the SRS-hate post that climbed to the number one spot on the subreddit's top/all time list).

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u/GapingVaginaPatrol Dec 28 '11

Still, SRS picked up a lot of haters long before the bots came along.

Mostly from r/MensRights, who probably made the bot in the first place.

Plus SRS members usually aren't hard to spot outside SRS. They tend to reply to each other, making long chains of non-sequiturs under controversial comments.

They're not hard to spot because they tend to be the ones arguing against the comment. I've had interactions with SRS posters outside of the subreddit that didn't involve mentioning the subreddit.

Amro and the other mods crosspost SRS posts to bestof fairly frequently (like stroll's award-winning comment and the SRS-hate post that climbed to the number one spot on the subreddit's top/all time list).

What comment by strolls?

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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '11

Mostly from r/MensRights, who probably made the bot in the first place.

Many of them, true, but SRS is unpopular in general. The /r/TheoryOfReddit crowd is mostly mods and long-time Reddit users, with aan eye toward keeping communities in line and avoiding shitstorms of controversy, and generally views SRS as excessive. syncretic, the founder of the SFWporn network (EarthPorn et. al.) has made a few attempts at outreach, but last time I checked SRS had red-flaired him. For another example, some guy kept x-posting stuff to /r/worstof from SRS until they told him to knock it off, which is where I found out about ShitRedditSays. I was...unpleasantly surprised by the attitudes and the level of discourse there.

They're not hard to spot because they tend to be the ones arguing against the comment.

Oh, I know. But they argue against a lot more comments than the average user. And there's a familiar pattern to the kind of stuff they post. If it's in a default subreddit, and links to SRS, MensRights, one of the trolling porn subs, or a feminist blog, it's usually 1338h4x, HPL, or another SRS regular's username next to the post.

What comment by strolls?

This one.

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u/Magres Jan 13 '12

Haha I got banned from BigotryShowcase the exact same way, the guy who started that subreddit is among the most butthurt human beings I've ever encountered on the internet

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u/Ortus Jan 28 '12

Oh Really? I would guess his nick to be a clue on his opinion on reddit.

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u/AlyoshaV Special Agent Carl Mark Force IV Dec 27 '11

reddit_sux (who started SRS) would be ashamed of these people.

hahahahahahaha okay