Ilvatu, on 10 September 2014 - 07:30 PM, said:
Many, if not all, PGI accounts have been "shadow-banned" from Reddit. This was due to your creation and heavy moderation of a new subreddit called /r/transverse to promote a kickstarter for PGI's new game. This was, in your words:
Most people who read /r/MWO regret the fallout that occurred there. This action you undertook to prevent this from happening in /r/transverse is a completely understandable prevention method from your perspective. However, if you had done your research, I think you would have found out that this actually goes against the neutrality and user moderation methods and policies of Reddit.
Reddit strongly frowns upon professionals, or owners of companies, running the respective subreddits of those entities. This is so that links shared on that website are created, shared, and upvoted/downvoted in a neutral environment. Positive or negative, its the community that decides on the content they want to see, not the moderators of that subreddit. This policy is in place to prevent people from doing exactly what you have done on Reddit. It is essentially this reason that you were banned, and your subreddit stripped away. You were attempting to circumvent the neutrality that Reddit prides itself on, and attempted to make /r/transverse a shout-box for PGI. Culling all content you disagree with, or shows the company in a bad light, and only promoting material that you agree with or approve of.
Reddit's policies are in place to prevent subreddits from becoming just this. People would stop using reddit if the respective subreddits for their favorite things were being moderated by the companies running those things. It represents a conflict of interest and of free speech for the users of Reddit, and goes against the very nature of Reddit itself.
Reddit is not a place you can go to and generate free advertising. It is a place where people can go to share their favorite links and discuss, without consequence, things they are interested in. Reddit is not like normal internet forums like these, or even SA, that you are familiar with. The community decides what content it sees, not the owners of the site or the subreddits.
You cannot just go to Reddit, create a subreddit, and moderate it how you do these forums. That's not how it works over there. You are obviously free to do things as you see fit here, but when you go to a 3rd party website you have to follow their policies. Just like we are not immune to yours here, you are not immune to theirs.
Furthermore, this thread represents an even worse situation. You have provided a link to where users of these forums can go and discuss the matter on Reddit. Users of Reddit would consider this to be "Brigading." Something you have, in your post, wrongfully accused members of SA doing to get your accounts banned on Reddit. "Brigading" itself has gotten a great many accounts on Reddit banned in the past, including SA members (/r/eve.) While the way you have linked to this thread on Reddit is very neutral, it is still a mass influx of users from this site to that one, and I doubt the mods of Reddit will view it in a good way. Asking users of this site to Brigade that thread for you is unlikely to change their actions.
For these reasons, I don't think that you should get the rights to /r/transverse back. Perhaps banning all your accounts was a bit extreme (especially in the cases of those who weren't really involved.) If you want to interact with Reddit, it is best to do it as a general user, not a moderator of the subreddit for your game.
Goons are not your enemy. They are not actively trying to sabotoge MWO. In fact, over the past couple weeks more and more goons have been flocking back to MWO. The ones who play aren't being as toxic as the ones in the SA thread, and many are defending the game (if not PGI employees). They want to be left alone to enjoy MWO, like everybody else. Many have spent money on the game in the last month, and are still actively playing and supporting your game. There aren't as many now as there used to be, but they are still a part of the community. It does nobody any favors calling them out like that.
Stop waging war over social media, Niko. If someone says something bad to you over Twitter, that doesn't mean you should ban their accounts here. If someone says something bad on Facebook, you shouldn't reference their name to their account info and ban them here. The same goes for Reddit and SA. You have no idea how many people are apprehensive to even talk about or post about MWO. They're afraid that no matter where they type you will ban them for the smallest slight. You want people talking more about the game. Thats how you generate more interest here and why your methods are actually impairing the MWO community, not improving it.
/thread