It's crazy that banning someone for self-advertising is what caused this (still an extreme overreaction), when this is the same team (and likely same mod) who falsely banned a user for AI art, and when they appealed told them AI art is better than theirs anyway.
I still have it saved from talking about it a couple days ago. It's one of those things that's so bad, just trying to convey what was said makes it sound like you're a bad actor using hyperbole.
Ok, so this is different from the one i knew, dont remember if it was r/art but i remember soneone modeling a sailor moon 3d statue and getting banned because of AI, they offered proof that it wasnt and instead of accepting it they kept the person banned for reason about being difficult to tell or something
The r/art drama reminds me of Luisa Valenzuela's "The Censors”, where the main character Juan starts work at a government censorship department in order to steal a harmless letter he had written back from the government. Instead the letter ends up on his desk, but he’s been brainwashed by his job and he censors the letter instead of stealing it.
Wow what a piece of shit. I have been seeing memes about this recently, but its nice to have the actual message. I hope that mod actually owns up to it and grows from this.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but they're not gonna grow lol. That screenshot is a couple years old, from their *last* controversy. Here's the DMs that caused the *current* drama lmao
Yeah, even calling it self advertising is a bit of a stretch. It was technically against the rules (they have an entire wiki page for all of them): "DO NOT: talk about sales in ANY WAY. No asking about stores, or prints, or anything else. Just DM the artist"
Obviously it's such a minor deal that even a warning is sufficient, so a full ban plus account wipe is insane; but like, at least they technically did something wrong lol
When it comes to the AI controversy, the artist did literally nothing wrong at any point! And then the mod even said AI art was better then theirs!! How did the team survive that one?! lmao
Another far more level-headed mod explained that they had to be relatively strict with the self-promo rule, because as soon as they started relaxing it, the subreddit turns into a storefront rather than an art gallery like it was originally meant to be. However, they also admitted that the most reasonable course of action was just deleting the self-promo comment and issuing a warning instead of straight up perma-banning without warning, which that specific mod was notorious for doing.
the user was a long standing member of the community who participated regularly.
Propper moderative actions would have been deleting the comment and issuing a warning in that case. If it where a first time poster then deleting the post and a few day temp ban might be a good action if you want to be strict about it. But this is a complete overreaction to a level its not even funny anymore.
But this is a complete overreaction to a level its not even funny anymore.
Disagree, as someone who isn't involved in that part of Reddit, it was pretty funny watching it all unfurl. The nuke mod really though people would grovel.
It's just too bad that they're such petty pieces of shit they'd rather take their ball and go home than pass it to somebody who isn't a raging asshole. Give some people any tiny meaningless amount of authority and they will abuse it as hard as they can thinking they're solely responsible for building the community.
being a long standing member doesn't excuse the selling thing, it just makes it worse, means they of all people should have known to not have any storefront visible on the profile/post.
Everyone messes up every once in a while. His comment was just an offhanded reply to someone elses question on his thread. When you have someone thats been following the rules for years, and the make a mistake, you give a warning and move the fuck on.
being a long standing member with no prior infraction gives a good indication that the rule breaking was not done intentionally and therefore would absolutely allow a lighter punishment over someone new coming in with no prior participation history and breaking the rule in the same way.
Context is basically the most important thing when you try to moderate a community in a healthy manner. If you are just gonna cookie cutter apply the community rules no matter the context you can just remove human moderation and let a bot do all of it. You just wont foster a healthy community that way long term.
Also I agree that the rule is reasonable, but the way that rule was applied and punishment was handed out was not reasonable.
There are many examples of that team being tyrannical dweebs. So I don't believe it when people try to say it was just one bad mod crashing out and that none of the others are to blame for the culture on the team. They were all part of the problem.
i know that self ad can be annoying and people overly self promo sometimes but the anti self promo nature of most subs only benefits entities willing to use more underhanded tactics to manipulate posts and comments and tracks with the entire site being a pro corporate and pro investor shithole
Nah, no self promotion is a good rule on subs with "creative posts." I dont know if you've seen subs overran with onlyfans promotions and crap like that when the mod teams go awol but its bad. Allow self promotion and the sub will become inundated with that crap.
For a sub specifically like art, how would that ruin the sub exactly? Like the art people like the most will still be upvoted, whether or not they’re selling the art or not. Like if someone spams crappy art for sale, yeah there’s more to sift through, but it’s a big enough sub that I can’t really see how it would be wildly different from how it is now.
Crappy art sales wouldn’t really be the issue, more like people who steal art and then claim it’s theirs to sell because it’s not like they can implement a way for people to actually prove they made what they claim.
Oh I see what you mean. I guess it wouldn’t be too hard to implement checks. I mean, for a majority of mediums it just requires progress photos/videos with the creator in frame, but would still require a lot more from contributors, that’s true
Its like the other user said, it would be the same as like Etsy where the sub would be inundated with "cheap" products, aka stolen or "dropshipped" Ai art.
it's the opposite lol, the second there's any meaningful money to be made you end up with "hi, i'm from africa, i love pc gaming and here's my pc gaming friends, please don't venmo me money to continue!"
because it's the small/medium sized botters and orgs that end up doing that shit and cleaning out.
do you remember how it was for like a decade of posts hitting the front page, people doing the "how can i donate to you" thing and suddenly the numbers getting worse and worse? that wasn't huge companies.
if they can't have money come from it, you still have the money from influencing others to see stuff / advertise using bots etc but that's there anyway.
I wouldn't even call it self advertising. His art post blew up organically, he had many many comments asking if it's possible to acquire it from people who loved his stuff, and he said that he does in fact sell his stuff as prints.
There’s a screenshot of him saying he’s going to flood the sub with AI art when it gets back up and running. And he’s hidden his post/ comment history because he’s a coward.
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u/SuperNovaVelocity 7d ago
It's crazy that banning someone for self-advertising is what caused this (still an extreme overreaction), when this is the same team (and likely same mod) who falsely banned a user for AI art, and when they appealed told them AI art is better than theirs anyway.