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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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So, mods. Now that you can speak freely, can you spill the beans on what was going on with the reddit admins/AOE? You made some allusions previously but I'd really like to understand what's going on. I have been led to believe that reddit is run by a cabal of terminally online tumblrinas. Surely that can't be right?

I'm also quite curious for an uncensored perspective on this. I knew it was bad, but the story below about being site-banned for coloring a pixel in the canvas thing is so far beyond what I knew about it really threw me. I've always pushed back against the ring of Gyges story, but if admins are willing to go that far just because they know no one will ever find out...

What story below, I can't find it?

Anyway, as one of the active participants in the cat thing, usually there are misconceptions going in both directions. First of all, rdrama people weren't entirely innocent since we actually included our site name in the picture eventually, which was a no no even for most benevolent sites and a no no no hell naw for us.

Weird things happened afterwards though. First of all, instead of using the official offensive content removal tool that just erased rectangles Chtorrr and Redtaboo started erasing our site name and then the cat pixel by pixel with no time delay. Worse, Chtorrr was not just erasing it but replacing it with a neighboring chaos chess pattern, both pretending that it's a routine overtake by them and giving them the unfair advantage of placing a pixel every second instead of every five minutes.

Then the next day shit hit the fan all over reddit, and attempts to censor it only added fuel to the fire. Then it went beyond reddit, for example a World of Warcraft streamer Asmongold made a video accusing admins of cheating that got 150,000+ views. Naturally, being on the business end of a pointed crowd of one hundred and fifty thousand angry people was not fun for the admins in question, and again, that's just from one source (but one of the biggest ones). So there was much not entirely unjustified whining about stochastic terrorism from the admin-loving mods.

It also felt kinda surreal for me, I can't really wrap my head over angering 150,000 people. And we didn't actually do this on purpose at all, it's like how people describe Steve Jobs as having a reality warping field around him that would make people to shoot for the stars, apparently we have something like that that makes people act very stupid, we drew our cute cat and admins (and then admin-supporting mods) went full retard in all the worst possible ways and brought it all on themselves.

Anyways, pretty much everyone involved on our side got a very special ban wherein reddit tells you that your password is wrong no matter what. You can still get a reset password link and it seems to work but nope. I actually tried to talk with the support about it, the only thing that came out of it was that they linked me to a page that admitted that it's a thing reddit might do. They also unleashed the full power of ban evasion detection on us, so I still haven't managed to make a working reddit account (though I do have some ideas about it). I don't know if there were any innocents swept along us, I asked mods of /r/cats (we got a recruitment post there!) if they heard any such reports and they said no, but of course it would be hard for a random stonewalled victim to report anything via reddit itself.

Yeah, it's, like, for a day or two your new account seems to work (besides half of the subreddits that flat out shadowban posts from new accounts with low karma making it a bit of a Catch 22) then they shadowban it for real, then you get logged out and can't log in because wrong password.