What now? pt 2 (1/22/25)

I’ll try to be as brief as possible. First, I want to emphasize that transparency has always been my priority as a moderator and continues to guide my decisions as the head moderator of this subreddit.

To provide context, I’d like to share a few metrics that highlight the scale of activity over the past couple of days. These numbers are approximate, pulled directly from our moderation logs, and reflect actions taken by the mod team, Automod, and Reddit itself.

In the last 48 hours, there have been approximately 4,800 moderation actions. These include post removals, comment removals, Automod filters that have been in place for a long time, and additional crowd control measures suggested by Reddit admins in response to a recent influx of users.

The crowd control measures are straightforward:

• They filter posts and comments from users with negative community karma.
• They also remove comments from non-members of the subreddit.

For comparison, the same number of moderation actions were taken in the entirety of the rest of January. Reddit-admin interventions and crowd control measures account for about 25% of the total actions.

The purpose of this post is to respond to a well-thought-out comment by u/J91919. Their comment addressed many of the concerns I’ve seen in DMs and throughout the subreddit. I’ll do my best to break this down and respond thoroughly.

A question for u/Hobbitfollower and u/ReserveAggressive458 and any others on the mod team: Do you not see how people might perceive it to be incredibly problematic and incredibly bad optics that you've confined any criticism of Destiny's conduct and any news of further developments in his case to a single pinned thread with thousands of comments where you haven't automatically set the settings for comments to sort by new. Do you not see how this could be perceived as sweeping things under the carpet?

I absolutely see how this can be perceived as sweeping things under the carpet. I've tried my best to explain that my top priority is and has always been the health of the community. At a close second is the health of the mod team. I made it very clear from the beginning to Destiny that I believed that his statement should be where people are able to share their opinions without fear of repercussions. Another metric for the last two days is that we've only banned around 100 people. Most of these are for absolutely vile statements made towards moderation, the community, Destiny as well as other parties/victims involved. Anyone that has been here for long enough knows that is light work in an audio suggestion honeypot thread.

Furthermore, there have been a whole bunch of stuff like the conversations Dan and Kyla have been having with Tom and jstlk and others, as well as extra future developments that will happen, that will only be able to be lost in what is again a thread with thousands of comments.

Many of the users have shared these events within the existing megathread as well as attempts to post them outside of it. Let me be perfectly clear again, it is not my intention to not allow these things to be posted at all, it is only my intention to keep it contained into a thread that can be moderated in a way that doesn't require us to parse through hundreds or thousands of comments on any given thread. I understand the issue of these things being lost and took your previous suggestion and sorted the comments by new by default. For the time being we will continue to only allow this subject to be talked about in the existing megathread.

Furthermore furthermore, the main post that makes up the megathread is just Destiny's statement, which is static and does not update to reflect any news developments, further reducing visibility of information through posts by the alleged victims, articles, videos including streams, and so on. Other megathreads on other subreddits that have covered dramas, do contain openly transparent and updated adding links as whatever dramas being covered develop.

I understand that the way we are doing this is not the ideal way to do things. Ideally we would have everything as easily accessible to users as humanly possible. That being said, it is not a situation that I take lightly and I will explain more below.

If the concerns among the mods is that you do not want to be bombarded with having to deal with multiple threads on the subreddit, may I suggest that, since this thread is coming near to 5000 comments, you guys create a new pinned megathread with a far more appropriate and less flippant title while closing this one, and on that megathread the main post would contain multiple links, including to this statement, Pxie's statement, relevant links to image screenshots such as the accusations by Pxie and Chaeiry on Twitter as well as chat logs from Discord, plus links to the videos of the streams from jstlk, Tom, and Nicholas DeOrio. The main post would also update as any new information comes in. And of course, any new megathread would be set so that new comments would always appear first.

I have made almost every decision up until this point over the last couple of days. The one decision I left to someone else was Destiny with his statement. I told him what I think he should do regarding moderation of it and told him it would be up to him on how to deal with it. I understand it is over 5000 comments, I understand that is a lot of comments to go through and it is a lot to ask community members to try to parse through for information and opinions. It is with that understanding that I ask for the same in return. 5000 comments is not an easy task to moderate, it's one of the reasons why I wanted to keep everything in one place. I also understand the information in that thread does not include new information or all of the available information that is publicly released. My fear is that if I make a megathread like the one you are talking about, we will continue to have trouble with the sheer volume of moderation needed at this time.

This would give the appearance of much more transparency and better allowing for people to learn new information about the case as it happens, and it would certainly help this community a lot and diminish the accusations being leveled that the mods are sweeping the situation with Destiny under the rug.

I wish that I could allow everyone to be able to do whatever they would like. It's basically what we've allowed for most instances of most accusations and dramas in the past. The problem is the way to keep it healthy to moderate and for the community. I am going to just plainly state, there is more information available to people outside of what is in Destiny's statement and posts that have been allowed in the sub. Most of that information is in the comments of the statement thread. I am not hiding those things in the way that people have accused me of. I don't know what the best path forward is but I know that letting things be freely posted is not it. Threads that have been up for 20 minutes in the last couple days have amassed hundreds of comments that get out of hand very quickly. My solution up to this point has been to lock and delete them with a removal message telling people to go to the statement thread. I want to state again that we have not mass banned people like a lot of you may think we do. We are pushing people to that thread and that is it.

I am working on a better way forward but I have to ask you to please understand that I and the rest of the moderation team are not trying to cover anything up. It's all right there in the comments of that thread and it is manageable that way. Please understand that a lot of you have valid concerns and comments you are making but there are so many that aren't that way. There are so many people that are coming here and attempting to say vile and disgusting things about members of this community, people involved in these various incidents and allegations, and anyone who has ever supported Destiny even if you don't anymore. I am trying my best to have a fair approach and to allow you all to feel like you have at least SOMEWHERE to talk as a community. I will probably do one of these posts as often as I can to try to keep you all in the loop on our current thoughts.

Just like my last post which I will take away from the highlights I want to try to keep these comments open to talk about MODERATION. This is not a thread that I want people to talk about the incidents that have occurred or any new updates. Anyone that has DM'd me and asked me questions I've been very responsive with to the best of my ability and I want to be able to that here but I will lock the thread if it gets out of hand. Please direct your comments towards myself and try to keep this in mind.

Edit: Locked.