It’s back!
By David Futrelle
Regrets, he’s had a few. Last night, the founder of the KotakuInAction subreddit, the hate-filled hangout that has been the main meeting place for Reddit’s angriest gamers since the days of GamerGate, decided to do something he’d been thinking of doing for a long time: he denounced his misbegotten creation as a “cancerous growth” on the internet and closed it down.
Describing the subreddit a huge mistake it was now time to correct, the Redditor known as david-me explained his actions in a long post on the Drama subreddit:
KiA is one of the many cancerous growths that have infiltrated reddit. The internet. The world. I did this. Now I am undoing it. This abomination should have always been aborted.
So in this moment with years of contemplation, I am Stopping it. I’m closing shop and I can’t allow anyone to exploit my handicap. [David-me says he has Generalized Anxiety Disorder and is on the Autism spectrum.] I’ve watched and read every day. Every single day. The mods are good at what they do, but they are moderating over a sub that should not exist.
He blamed Reddit for enabling the shitshow by not cracking down on hate speech.
Reddit and it’s Admins … are the stewards of hate and divisiveness and they let it go. They go so far as to even claim there is nothing they can do about it. …
Don’t let Reddit pretend otherwise. They know what goes on here. They know everything. So either they choose to allow it, or $$$$ makes them.
He went on to call out the equally hateful but much larger The_Donald subreddit as
a viral cancer that is destroying the minds of millions of Reddit users each day; And they allow it. … Conflict breeds users and drives viewer counts, driving advertisers and required profits.
Naturally, Reddit being what it is, site admins moved quickly to restore the subreddit — and it was reportedly up again in less than an hour, according to Polygon.Which kind of, sort of proves david-me’s points, doesn’t it?
The other subreddit mods were not pleased by the shutdown. One of them explained their version of events in a stickied post shortly after the subreddit was restored,
david-me apparently went off the deep end, making a long screed post on another sub about nuking KiA as he made KiA private, kicked the entire mod team, nuked the CSS, and generally made a clusterfuck of things. Thankfully, an amazing admin was online who helped restore everything, and has locked david’s permissions to mail-only while an investigation goes on into the matter later before they decide if anything further needs to be done.
That’s Reddit for you, I guess. As of right now, KiA remains up, and the regulars are happily babbling away about all the attention the shutdown got them and writing huge walls of text on how the whole thing shows that “GamerGate still has momentum.” Which I suppose is true, in that gamer dudes are still harassing female game developers they don’t like and endlessly nattering about those games journalists and publications who have committed the alleged huge ethical breach of disagreeing with them.
Shitty dudes on the internet remain shitty dudes on the internet, news at 11.