How /r/therewasanattempt’s war on /r/kotakuinaction is a microcosm for our divided internet.
As a gaming blogger, I follow a ton of news sources, from Polygon to Dexerto to TheGamer. I even follow strange, somewhat partisan micro-communities like /r/kotakuinaction – a subreddit seemingly formed from one faction of Gamer Gate which has remained critical of the ‘wokified’ mainstream gaming press ever since. I was surprised to find, yesterday, that I had been banned from another subreddit that I had never posted on, commented on, and find to be little more than a frivolous collection of fails. This subreddit, /r/therewasanattempt is a dirty pleasure for over 7 million Redditors, making it a solidly mid-sized community in the context of Reddit’s billion users.
Casual Bannings
The message from /r/therewasanattempt, read more like a casual trolling than a violation notice.
“Hello, You have been permanently banned from participating in r/therewasanattempt because you broke this community’s rules. You won’t be able to post or comment, but you can still view and subscribe to it.
Note from the moderators:
You have been banned for participating in the bigoted, nonsense-regurgitating subreddit r/kotacoinaction. Also because your shoulders are soft and you look weak. Like, worse than Joel from TLOU2.
Friendly reminder that:
the future is female
Rainbow Road is an LGBTQ+ track and always has been
Don Cheadle > Rowling
white people do not experience racism in any meaningful way, and any white who cries about racism is an eensy weensy baby who couldn’t for a second handle real racial stress
gamers will never rise up. not from their couches, not from their futons
If you have a question regarding your ban, you can contact the moderator team by replying to this message.
This reads like a 3AM rage post on a message board – how is this an official policy statement from the moderators of this 7 million strong Reddit?
Perhaps by looking back into the history of /r/KotakuInAction and its detractors, we can gain some more context.
How Gamer Gate spawned an online community that still exists 9 years later
To summarize Gamer Gate and its spawned subreddit, here’s a fair description of the critical aspect of the community’s nature:
- A game developer sleeping with a journalist who then gave her game very favorable reviews (when the gaming community thought the game was not very good). She also got a gaming fundraiser shut down just before starting her own gaming fundraiser.
- A PR agent sleeping with the head judge of a game festival and her clients’ games winning.
- The two women above, as well as others related to the industry jump into the heated discussion online. A few receive death threats. All sides condemn harassment and threats.
- Gaming journalists publish articles declaring “gamers are dead” and paint them as cis white male misogynists who hate women in their previously-male-dominated industry. The allegations of corruption are not addressed.
- Gamers outraged at the “anti-gamer” sites who ran the articles stereotyping and shaming their own fan base.
- Gamers are upset that SJWs are deflecting the issue of corruption and turning it into one of misogyny and harassment of females in the industry. Articles that emerge in the BBC and Guardian do not mention the original issue of corruption, but focus on the death threats.
So we have some very seedy connections/ nepotism revealed in the gaming & gaming media industries and a lot of Woke-washing blaming a certain ethnicity and gender for all of the harassment and ills within the industry, while the gaming muckety-mucks seemingly sweep their corruption back under the rug.
With that as the backdrop, one can imagine a great deal of animosity that has built up in the subsequent nine years. Similar animosity has played out in the YouTube creator revolt against Disney, for instance. With YouTuber Nerdrotic being in the vanguard of this type of anti-SJW critique, especially in its apparent take over of the Star Wars Universe.
KotakuInAction’s Reubttal
The moderators of KotakuInAction responded to the bot ban by posting a somewhat tepid, offhand explanation of why there is no higher body to appeal to, why Reddit Co. does not concern itself with these intra-sub squabbles, and that users should just move on:
I’m making this metapost for two reasons, one so people stop posting more of the same thread over and over, and two so I can link people back to it the next time there’s a wave of bot bans.
I’ll steal from my old comment a year or so ago, but to explain this again since I see the misconception repeated:
Subreddits running ban bots or banning users is not against reddit rules and reporting mods to admins with the report code of conduct violation feature will yield no results, and at worse will backfire against your own account for “abusing the report function” by reporting something that isn’t a violation. I would advise you do not do this because it’s a waste of time at best and dangerous to your account at worst.
A few years ago, it was well understood you couldn’t use ban bots or ban a user for something that happened on another subreddit, and if you look at older copies of the moderator code of conduct you’ll see lines that support this interpretation. One problem however is there is a clear loophole.
As a moderator, you should not be banning users from Sub A for breaking rules on Sub B.
You can ban users who participate in Sub B, even if they haven’t participated in Sub A, if you have such a rule that you don’t allow users who participate in Sub B. In that case, participating in Sub B is against the rules of Sub A, so the above guideline no longer applies.
They have also gone on the record at times that mods have the right to ban users for any reason, including no reason at all, so whether the above applies anyway is debatable.
This loophole pretty much invalidates the spirit of the original moderator guidelines but admins do not care, and this is shown in the fact that these bots have been running for years now with mountains of complaints and no action has been taken against them. It’s not even an issue of playing wack-a-mole with bots for reddit, most subreddits using these tactics are generally using the same few bots and being quite open on their reasoning and intentions with using them.
We have had warnings in the comment submission field and post submission field for over half a decade now, long before mods started regularly using ban bots and this issue became a much bigger problem. It’s not a new phenomenon, and not really relevant to KiA, these are squarely disagreements with the moderation of other subreddits and do not concern the functioning of this subreddit and that’s why you’ll see posts following these topics always hit by R9 (metareddit) as they have been for years and years now. If you’re on old reddit, it’s shown in multiple places with fancy CSS. If you’re on new reddit (for some reason) it’s been in the sidebar on the right. You have been warned.
Most of these subreddits will ban you silently without even providing a message, I’ve been seemingly banned from several subreddits I’ve never participated in and I have never once received a message informing me of the case. It is what it is. Sometimes blocking the ban bots can prevent this sort of automated action, but it’s not foolproof.
Whether or not you agree with the tactic of blanket bans against persons you dislike (I don’t), the bot approach is heavyhanded and destructive. Time and time against we see brigaders or well-intentioned good faith users who visit or make a one-off comment to disagree with something who get autobanned just the same. Some of these bans might get overturned in appeal but I would wager a guess that the kind of mod employing blanket bans doesn’t care for the nuance and will ignore appeals just the same.
Everyone is Drawing Battle Lines
This seems an appropriate enough metaphor for the direction our culture is taking. To paraphrase the point of view of /r/Therewasanattempt:
Communication, empathy and understanding is very passé, these days. This is a war for the heart of the West, after all. There are only winners and losers. There are only the powerful and the oppressed. Any giving of ground, working toward mutual understanding, or compromise is yet another manipulation by the oppressors. There can be no quarter, there can be no mercy. Silence your critics, cancel your rivals, destroy your enemy.
The battle lines have been drawn. And, strangely enough, the frontline of this new culture war is taking place in the backrooms of message boards.
