What recourse do I have if a set of corrupt reddit moderators is ruining my gaming community?

[john01dav]

Hello,

 

Me and one other person, along with a wonderful staff team, have been running a modded Minecraft server for almost 2 years. The vast majority of our players come from a particular subreddit (/r/feedthebeastservers), however, for awhile (< 1 year) it has seemed like the moderators on that subreddit despise us for some reason. In our initial confrontation, they became heavily pissed that we were using a bot to automatically post our server listing each week. This bot followed every rule on their subreddit, more precisely than a human can due to the temporal nature of their rules (don't post a server more than once every 7 days). As such, they changed the rules to explicitly forbid bots, and then banned our shared account, despite the fact that it didn't make a single post after the new rules were put in place. When we brought this up with them, they spouted bullshit, basically saying we broke the rules even though the rule did not exist when we supposedly broke it. They then insisted that we manually post it from one of our personal accounts each week. After some discussion, the other owner and I agreed that he would manually post it each week, which was working well enough (we could no longer post it at the exact time each week, when there were the most people on the subreddit), until now. Just earlier today, when he went to post our listing again, after waiting for more than 7 days, he found it quickly removed. Then, I posted it from my account. My post was then removed a bit later. When he tried to contact the mods about this, to figure out why our posts were being moved, he was banned with an accusation of vote manipulation, along with the mods claiming that they have pictures as evidence. This is not something we ever did, and a request to see the pictures resulted in both of our accounts being muted. Because the vast majority of our new players come from this subreddit, we really need it to maintain this community approaching is 2nd anniversary (which is quite long for a Minecraft server, most don't last a year). What recourse do we have? We prefer something that forces these mods to face justice (ie. their replacement and a global ban from Reddit), but we are open to any solutions that allow our server to continue existing.

 

EDIT: One other thing I would like to add is that a particular staff member has expressed suspicion that one of the servers also advertised on this same subreddit is owned by some of the subreddit's mods, and that they are getting butt hurt that our server, due to superior quality, is taking all their players.

[Eaglerino]

You likely have no recourse. Find another subreddit or other forums, make your own discord, heck even make your own subreddit

[john01dav]

2 minutes ago, Eaglerino said:

You likely have no recourse. Find another subreddit or other forums, make your own discord, heck even make your own subreddit

The issue with that (although we will probably do it anyway) is that a discord, subreddit, or forums existing doesn't mean anyone will pay attention to it. That sub that we are now banned from is basically our only source of new people. Is there some good way to address this?

[Eaglerino]

There's more than 1 way to attract people to a server. There's no reason to rely solely on one subreddit

 

Reddit mods are 'volunteer' people and there's nothing you can really do about them unless they're breaking reddit rules. You getting banned for auto-posting once a week isn't breaking any reddit rules

 

And, I'm not an expert in getting an active Minecraft server running. I'm just saying you probably can't do anything about these mods. Back in the day when I played I had a sort of word-of-mouth among my friends and their family members, but that was over 5 years ago

[AntonChigurh]

2 minutes ago, john01dav said:

The issue with that (although we will probably do it anyway) is that a discord, subreddit, or forums existing doesn't mean anyone will pay attention to it. That sub that we are now banned from is basically our only source of new people. Is there some good way to address this?

Nope. Reddit is a complete cesspool, and the same few people mod most subs or are friends with people who mod others. I'd say your best course of action is to explore other options. Maybe take to YouTube and make a channel for your servers, or convince a big YouTuber to play on them perhaps. Make a Discord, post on forums, post on other Discords, stream on Twitch, etc.

[Arika]

well it's their sub, they can technically do what ever they like with it as long as they aren't breaking the side-wide rules or moderation guidelines.

[john01dav]

1 minute ago, Eaglerino said:

There's more than 1 way to attract people to a server. There's no reason to rely solely on one subreddit

 

Reddit mods are 'volunteer' people and there's nothing you can really do about them unless they're breaking reddit rules. You getting banned for auto-posting once a week isn't breaking any reddit rules

 

And, I'm not an expert in getting an active Minecraft server running. I'm just saying you probably can't do anything about these mods. Back in the day when I played I had a sort of word-of-mouth among my friends and their family members, but that was over 5 years ago

The other ways (server lists, or youtube sponsorship placements) are either ineffective (we measured multiple server lists, and it seems the only real way to make them useful is to pay them more money than we have) or *way* too expensive for the amount of money the server has. While I absolutely agree that relying on one subreddit is a terrible idea, there really isn't anything else nearly as effective.

[john01dav]

1 minute ago, Arika S said:

moderation guidelines.

Looking at these, I think I may have a case for them being violated. Thank you for mentioning them.

[john01dav]

Reading through a lot of the posts here, it seems our best course of action is to create our own replacement community. When doing this, how does one get anyone to join the new community? Just putting it up won't advertise it.