Twice your moderators have PM'd me to answer questions about photography raised by users in their subreddits. Three times they've asked me to cross-post my work to other subreddits. Yet I refuse to play because this: Is condescending, insulting and derogatory and I won't stand for it. You aren't judging my ability as a photographer, you're judging my ability to abide by your arbitrary taxonomy. You're judging my ability to cowtow to mad hatters. You're seeing how high I jump when you shout at me because you see shouting at me as your privilege. Who cares? The moderators in your network that wish I was still submitting. Here's a lake your network will never see: Not because I don't think it's worthy, but because I don't think your network is.even then, it's still largely subjective in a lot of cases which subreddit a picture "belongs in"... so users submit, they get their image removed, and most likely have a conversation with a mod about it.
And that's the point where I usually say, "Feel free to unsubscribe." I built /r/EarthPorn up from nothing. I grew a network that began as three scrawny subreddits with only a few thousand subscribers between them into the quality photography powerhouse that it is today, with 40+ subreddits, hundreds of frequent submitters and several hundred thousand users. /r/EarthPorn will have 200,000 subscribers very soon. It became that large and successful because I promoted the hell out of it, and ran it with an iron fist from day 1. There are no polls, there is no community outreach, you do what the moderators say, or you can leave. Most of our users like it that way. The ones that don't, well... they left.Is condescending, insulting and derogatory and I won't stand for it.
Have done. Good riddance. Here's the part you're missing: you're overseeing a subreddit ostensibly dedicated to sharing images, but your core mission is actually "censor images." Your core skills are "talk about images" and "classify images" and your highest-ranking images are generally not OC. Because Corbis or Getty aren't half the dicks you are. And /r/DoesAnybodyElse will have 160,000, despite the fact that their charter is essentially "kill the subreddit." In other words, your "growth" is only marginally better than a group of people dedicated to killing growth. And here's the amazing thing. Flickr is dead. Instagram is masturbatory lo-fi. Deviantart is teen sketches of Manga. Yet somehow you've managed to keep the SFWPorn network from becoming THE imaging community for the Internet even as /r/IAmA lands Obama. Do you think they have any less of an iron fist than you do? I don't. I think they're less arbitrary. So keep patting yourself on the back. But when your goalposts are "we've had less explosive growth than Reddit as a whole" I think you need to recognize that even grading on the curve, you're falling far short of success. exactly.And that's the point where I usually say, "Feel free to unsubscribe."
/r/EarthPorn will have 200,000 subscribers very soon
The ones that don't, well... they left.
A lot of that has to do with the name. The majority of redditors use reddit during work or school. Lots of work and school networks block anything with the word "Porn" in it. There are other reasons, such as our refusal to worship imgur (anything rehosted is removed). That's all irrelevant, though. I don't think you understand how I moderate most of my subreddits. In subreddits like /r/TheoryOfReddit, where the community was essentially handed to me, I take my mod duties very seriously. We discuss every rule change long and hard, we get community feedback, and we have a very large mod team for a moderately sized subreddit, meaning more community representation. I feel like I have a responsibility there. If I didn't, I wouldn't have accepted the moderator position. Not to mention, that subreddit is actually productive. It isn't just devoted to eye candy or humor. Most of my subreddits, however, are subreddits that I created myself. They did not exist before I typed their name into the "create a subreddit" box and hit submit. I'm talking about subreddits like /r/EarthPorn and /r/reactiongifs. They are also usually "low-effort content" subreddits... images. It started when I used to browse /r/pics on a daily basis. I got sick of the chaos, and I started to create subreddits that would siphon off one type of image or another, either to improve /r/pics by removing crap (/r/reactiongifs), or to filter out the good content so I didn't have to wade through the memes and image macros that dominated /r/pics at the time (The SFWPorn Network). I made the rules exactly how I wanted them, and I submitted the type of content I wanted to see there, and I added the mods that I wanted to add there. Reddit policy is that mods are gods in their own subreddits, and the top mod is Zeus, so I acted accordingly. They are essentially moderator playgrounds, and the subscribers are free to come and go as they please. Sure, we all want to see the subreddit thrive, but we also want to have fun doing so. That's very important. No one's getting paid. If you aren't having fun, why bother? As you know, getting called a niggerface jewcunt isn't fun, so we ban those people. And then if they send a mod mail cussing us out even more, we reply in nothing but reaction gifs. That, my friend, is fun. I never wanted The SFWPorn Network to be THE imaging community on the internet. I wanted it to do exactly what it's doing now - provide "eye candy" images in various categories for easy consumption. That's it. When I go to /r/EarthPorn I want to see a landscape - not a waterscape, not a cityscape, not some abandoned farmhouse. I want to see a natural landscape. If I wanted to see those other things I'd go to /r/WaterPorn or /r/CityPorn or /r/AbandonedPorn. If a moderator thinks a picture is in the wrong category, they remove it. If we could simply move it to another subreddit, we would, but you know that getting the mod tools we need from the admins is like pulling teeth. I doubt it will ever happen so we work with what we have. The SFWPorn Network is a nice little package, all wrapped up in a bow, designed to be mostly bot-moderated, with human mods simply 'moving' submissions that they feel are categorized incorrectly. We aren't catering to the submitters here, we're catering to the consumers. You see, I know how I could make The SFWPorn Network become THE imaging community on the internet. Remove all the rules about categories, and as long as it's serious photography (aka no memes/image macros), and vaguely related to the subject at all, it would be allowed. We wouldn't bother requiring the resolution in the title or any of the other weird rules. It would be /r/pics split into subcategories. In fact... wasn't that your suggestion in the first place?
Nope. My suggestion was to come up with rules that people could follow without playing "mother may I" because your dick gets hard telling people what to do. And we've probably spent ten thousand words on this and you still steadfastly refuse to see the fact that insisting people abide by your god-given right to be an arbitrary dick is what makes people hate moderators.
We have rules in the sidebar, we enforce those rules, and we're perfectly polite about it. If you disagree with those rules, that's fine, you can go start your own landscape photography subreddit and see how that does for ya. The fact that we've spent 10,000 words discussing this is proof that I was willing to listen to what you had to say about it. You didn't really suggest any solutions to any problems, you just bitched about the ones we had come up with. I really don't know where you want this discussion to go. One minute we were talking about power users and the next minute you were ranting about the SFWPorn Network.
The two are inextricably tied. I ask for "give me rules I can follow" and I get "I am Zeus and if I want you to have to interact personally with a moderator every time you want to post, you'll bloody well do it because moderators have absolute power." If you don't see a link - and if you don't see that every bit of enmity you've ever engendered has been wholly due to your attitude - you are beyond help.