META Subreddit Bans, New Reddit Policy, and Our Official Lifeboat (self.KotakuInAction)
submitted 2 hours ago * by HandofBaneMod - Lawful Evil HNIC[M] - announcement
So it appears the rumors floating around had some substance to them. Roughly 2000 subs have been banned, 90% of which had on average 10 or fewer user actions per day. Alongside that were around 200 more active subs, one "trophy kill" of the mostly-already-dead The_Donald, and a token sacrifice of ChapoTrapHouse so they could continue to pretend this wasn't a giant one-sided hit like most previous ban waves. I am not defending most of the subs which got purged, as I have not personally seen their content to judge whether they were actually breaking any rules or just made the shit-list of the powermods brought on board to offer up the heads they demanded on pikes to appease the angry mob.
We have managed to make it through mostly unscathed, with no new admin action taken against KiA or its users that I can find in any of our moderation logs. We also have not been issued any warnings or such via modmail or elsewhere that I am aware of. That's not to say we are going to remain completely unaffected by this, though. In addition to the bans, some new policy has been pushed forward by the admins. There is also a bit of explanation of the process used to reach this new policy point provided elsewhere in standard reddit tradition of not having all the info in one location for ease of access.
So what does this mean for us, here, at KotakuInAction? It means we have a bit harsher enforcement that is being forced from above on some specific things, which we will have to see if we need to adjust our existing rules to account for. It means that we have some rather odd parts of the new policy in place that I don't think the admins fully thought through (the "things against a majority do not count" statement should be fun to watch play out since women make up a majority at 50.8% of the population per the last US Census).
In addition, we are launching our lifeboat site officially. It's still mostly barebones, as we are having some complications with importing the CSS (as a simple copypaste from reddit would not function properly), but that should hopefully be resolved over the next week or so. So without further ado, I present to you
https://kotakuinaction.win/ This site will have similar-yet-lighter rules to what you all are used to here, as we have a few things that become unnecessary due to different sitewide rules/TOS to worry about there. As we get the CSS and such functional we will get the new rules list up and running, but until then please treat it as being under effectively the same rules as here, with a bit lighter hand regarding some of the more insane things that we have had to deal with being pushed in place from above either by order or by watching precedent being put in place based on admin action against specific posts/comments/users.
And to head off the inevitable question related to the new site - yes, we are now part of the expanding communities.win group, and yes one of the first things we made clear was that we still hold to the political neutrality aspect of our mission statement. This is intended to be KotakuInAction in full, with no mandate that anyone be of any particular political leaning. We want our lefties just as much as our right wingers, as long as everyone can manage to stay within the rules and remain mostly civil with each other. The admins of the site reached out to us about 2 1/2 weeks ago, we spoke for quite a while to cover our primary concerns, and decided that this would be a far better option for our primary lifeboat than what we had been working on at the time. We still have two alternative lifeboats in various states of not-quite-readiness, and may announce further details on those down the road.
There are still a few account related hiccups that should not affect most people going on with the new site we are getting worked out with their admins, but feel free to head on over and reserve your username now. We will be maintaining some moderation across both sites, and possibly bringing on new moderators both here and there in the near future, depending on how the traffic looks.
We will maintain our presence here on reddit as long as we can, and kotakuinaction.net will continue to direct people here until we get to where we no longer exist on reddit, then it will redirect to the lifeboat.
I'll be around for the next few hours to answer questions and such, as will some of the other moderators who have been helping get this in motion.
