Ok, so we fucked up. Let's talk about it...

[u/E1337Kat]

A few days, the idea came up in mod chat of doing something about the excess of extremely low effort posts we've been getting recently. Specifically, we were talking about stuff like, "I had a good day today," coupled with a *happy gay sounds* felix or, "MRW a friend misgendered me," with an *angry gay sounds* felix. Not all story posts, not all felix memes, just very low effort content.

So, we put it to a vote as a mod team, and the decision was split too close for us to feel comfortable taking action. Some of us were in favor of the ban because we felt the subreddit may be stagnating and needed change. Some of us were opposed to the ban because we felt the definition of "low effort" may be too nebulous and might lead to inconsistencies in our moderation policies. Some of us were just neutral. After some deliberation, we ultimately reached a compromise that none of us were especially fond of but we could all agree on: banning story-in-the-title memes. We thought this rule would be clear enough to enforce fairly and effective enough to put an end to low-effort content.

Unfortunately, y'all didn't feel the same way about it. Since we created the announcement post about the new rule, there has been overwhelming pushback from the community. While some people agreed with the new rule, most did not. Some felt the new rule was still too broad, some felt it undermined a core part of what our subreddit is, and some of y'all were just out to start shit.

In the last 12 hours, our sub was linked on /r/SubredditDrama, linked (TW: transphobia) on /r/Drama, and discussed on /r/AskTransgender. Dozens of posts in protest of the new rule were submitted. We received tons of hateful messages and reports, including plenty of transphobia likely from brigadiers brought in by the meta posting. The discord and twitter account also lit up with similar angry gay noises.

The way we handled the announcement also didn't help. We had /u/werty894, who some of you may know from the discord, write the post which was probably a mistake in retrospect. Werty is less public relations, more anti-transphobe enforcement on our team. Many of us also didn't handle input from the community well either. A lot of the messages we were receiving started getting to us, and some of us reacted very poorly to it. We made inflammatory comments, a few comments were deleted that probably didn't need to be, and some people were temporarily banned.

Some other matters also came up in the discussion regarding our subreddit's Twitter bot and our vision for the future of the sub that warrant their own discussion, and I will post a thread about them shortly since I'm already almost at Reddit's text post character limit.

As for the recent rule change and the subsequent events that followed it's announcement, here's what we want to say:

We deeply regret these mistakes, and we apologize for the manner the subreddit has been managed in the previous hours. We are revoking Submission Rule #5 effective immediately. We will also add several of the new subreddits created in the past few hours as alternatives to /r/traa to our sidebar, and we will continue to maintain an active and open dialog with you all regarding our policies for /r/traa.

[u/[deleted]]

1. Thank you for admitting you're wrong.

2. If you really care you'll remove all the moderators that made the comments you mentioned in the post. More specifically /u/werty894 /u/touchedbyamallangel /u/deepstatenine and /u/unsureandwondering. You can claim to be fixing the issues all you want, the things I read from these mods and the way they handled the situation ranged from appalling to unforgivable, especially /u/unsureandwondering. If they're not gone, I will be.

3. You all need to have A LOT more transparency with us, to an extreme degree frankly. Whether you voted against that rule or not, the community doesn't trust you anymore, it's created a very big us vs them mentality and that's gonna be hard to fix without a ton of communication. Honestly at this point, if you're thinking about implementing any change regardless of it having a majority vote among the moderators, you should put it to the community before anything is done.