/r/50501, the democratic protest subreddit, gets the /r/antiwork hostile takeover treatment after grifters pounce on it.
Original post: https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1k7qj5j/r50501_has_been_locked_and_restricted_due_to/
And this update post after the admins replaced the mod team:
Reddit is a wild place and no shit someone would try to snatch up the branding created by earnest dupes. I had a non-political sub once and it was pretty low activity, just me and 3 or 4 others posting. Then some "artist" with a brand that sounded similar to my sub name messaged me and asked if they could post their work there. I told them they could as long as it was related to the subject of the sub. About two months later they opened a takeover bid with the reddit admins, claiming I was an absentee mod.
Reddit is not a content aggregator, it's an advertisement/marketing sales site. You go make a sub about your niche hobby or subject and eventually someone will try to monetize it. All these online marketing courses tell you to go create a presence on reddit and other sites.
To be totally fair, I already thought 50501 was a paid democrat thing. Nothing on reddit ever really feels grassroots anymore.
In retrospect I'm reasonably certain the guy who took over /r/snackexchange was an admin shill account. When the moderator blackout protests happened, I was bored of the generic tactic and turned the subreddit into the Democratic People's Republic of /r/snackexchange. Since Spez phrased his ratfuckery as wanting to empower users, I empowered the users. Every day all of the rules and stylesheet were erased and there was a democratic centralist vote to completely change every single part of the subreddit. My userbase was essentially totally supportive of the protest- like a 98% upvote ratio on the posts leading up to it- and everyone understood the joke for one time on that website. The only replies were to reinstate all of the original rules and stylesheet or joke suggestions that I took seriously. Voting for the moderators was also part of that daily purge.
This guy was the only person throughout a week or two of the protest who didn't understand the joke and refused to when I explained it across multiple messages. He was insistent on becoming a mod and continuing the subreddit normally when all of my other mods across my other subreddits were on board with the protest. The moment he voted himself into power as the most limited kind of mod, he started pushing me to let him make a branded website he controlled where users would have to submit photo ID before posting in the subreddit. For over a decade everyone who moderated had been so concerned about personal information that we hated when users sent us their unredacted shipping labels as proof they had sent a package. There was never any interest in even setting up a gmail account to do that, let alone a website with all of its security vulnerabilities.
As soon as he was made a moderator, he went to the admins and said I was an absentee mod because I was protesting. They didn't just replace me with any of the existing active mods who had been there for years, nor any of the power users who had spent hundreds of dollars on packages across those years, but this guy who had only posted one time a decade prior. Otherwise it was a very underused account that only posted generic comments. The userbase again universally hated him for opening up the subreddit as normal with the intent to soon harvest the names and addresses of every account posting there, so the admins backed off and replaced him with an existing mod who supported the protest but kept it open as normal. That account then stopped posting entirely.
Something was really off about him. A few years prior a new mod in /r/fifthworldproblems tried doing a similar branded external website and they had similarly weird energy so it might just be grifter energy, but this guy may as well have been giving the admin line word-for-word. Across maybe a couple dozen messages I couldn't convince him of a single reason why the website was becoming something really bad, even where it concerned his self-interest as someone who wanted to be a moderator.
As soon as he was made a moderator, he went to the admins and said I was an absentee mod
Someone tried that on a shitty little comm I ran, running to the admins because I didn't give a shit about reddit rules and generally let people go hog wild bullying the chuds that occasionally wandered in before banning them.
The moment they made an appeal to remove the hidden mod team (read: me and my sock puppets) for inactivity I banned them to prove the mods were active on the sub.
It's such a weird way to pathologically chase power. Moderating is such a miserable "job" that I haven't once considered it here. You see the worst of the community and have to shield it from the hogs that make that look tame. At least here there's an actual thing worth building, but on reddit it's volunteering to be the schmuck pushing the death star button for the privilege of being the schmuck who pushes the death star button. When the /r/fifthworldproblems guy got weird the rest of us were just like "fuck you everything about this subreddit is terrible now and the joke should have died the moment I made it". He was convinced it was his empire.