The top mod ‘u/Tarrot_Card‘ of r/livestreamfail got forcibly removed after people complained that he was promoting something shady in the sub. He promptly made this response video to Spez (CEO of Reddit) calling out Reddit for removing him and asking for more perks and privileges for mods in subreddits.

I, for one, think that Reddit moderators should be treated like celebrities or influencers. Not because they deserve respect or anything, but because they have real power and influence.

Hello Spez, Mr. CEO of Reddit. I hope you have received this public video that I have created and sent to you via your email. If not, I hope anybody who cares about the topic in this video can get this to him in any way that you can. This video is about a topic of deadly seriousness, and that is of Reddit moderation and the state of your platform. But first, some background. I'm Brian, or stale 2000 or Tarot card. I was the top moderator of your number one gaming subreddit r/livestreamfail before I was recently removed from that position by the Reddit code of conduct team. I became a Reddit moderator for one reason and that is because I think that Reddit communities and correspondingly its moderators have massive power and influence and for some reason nobody seems to notice, care, or take this seriously. Least of all its moderators or the company. In this video, I will go over why I believe this and I will also talk about a code of conduct moderation action that was taken against me due to good faith mistakes that I believe were caused by a clear lack of direct material support that the company gives its moderators. I will end the video by talking about what you Spez can do to fix this problem as well as what I and other communities can do in case Reddit does not solve this very serious mismanagement problem regarding the lack of support that is given to moderators. First, I will go over the code of conduct action and why I was removed as the top moderator of r/livestreamfail. This sounds like stupid internet drama, I know, but I'm going to talk about how this is a very clear example about how Reddit's mistakes causes very serious problems to Reddit's community and the company as a whole. Here's what happened. There was an announcement related to a live stream related game show called Million-Dollar Fan. It was basically a game show like Survivor or Big Brother where fans of a streamer compete in different challenges with a, you know, an influencer or a streamer for various prizes. The kicker here is that there was a grand prize of $20 million supposedly. This was supposedly going to be aired on Amazon Prime and it was also confirmed to be including a couple midsized and large streamers like [snorts] Alexandra and Andrea Botez, Extra Emily, Canoot, and a few others. Additionally, the opportunity was supposedly brought to these streamers by a company called Mythic Talent, which is a well respected uh streamer agency that represents hundreds of live streamers. I heard about the game show a few hours after it got announced by a couple major live streamers. It sounded like the perfect type of content for a live stream fail. I mean, reality TV, game show, live streaming, gaming, uh, you know, that's perfect for LSF, which is about fun, crazy content about kind of live streaming gamers. So when I heard about this, I was very excited. I immediately reached out to the organizers to see if we could set up some sort of a collaboration. This collaboration would just be to get cool content on the subreddit. No, you know, financial incentives, no moderators being paid. Uh basically none of anything like that. Just fun, cool stuff for the community in the subreddit. For collaborations, the first obvious thing that came to mind was, uh, how do we get their content on the subreddit? either some super fans or some editors could clip some cool hype moment from the show and then post it to the subreddit. But I also had a stretch goal and that was what if LSF could be part of the show in some way. I don't know, there could be like a LSF themed best clip contest like contestants compete in one of the kind of small challenges, they make the best clip and then somebody kind of wins a prize at the end. It was a stretch goal though. So, I reached out to the organizers and to my surprise, they immediately understood what LSF was, what power it had, and they even agreed to the stretch goal of like the cool competition to have in the actual show. From my perspective, this felt like one of the coolest things that a subreddit has ever done. I mean, being in a freaking reality TV show in a topic that's directly related to the subreddit, how awesome. and then you know maybe I could leverage this to get even more opportunities either for our subreddit or for other subreddits across the entire platform. That's how I felt at least and that's clearly not how it worked out. After [snorts] they agreed to kind of a couple [clears throat] of these kind of requests that I had in my stretch, they immediately started moving very quickly. They, you know, we wrote up an announcement and they wanted this out within like 24 hours. So we quickly worked to make an announcement together and I posted it the next day. When I posted it, everybody in the comment section immediately yelled, "Scam, scam, scam, scam, scam." This initially didn't actually worry me because no matter what we do, people call it a scam. I mean, I've done AMAs with the Twitch co, people called that a scam. And I was also thinking like multiple major live streamers were involved, Mythic Talent was involved. Surely, they had done their due diligence, right? Additionally, the thing that people were the most skeptical about was the $20 million grand prize. This initially confused me as well, but once I heard that, you know, Amazon Prime was allegedly involved, uh, my initial concerns were assuaded. I mean, think about it. Amazon Prime has spent lots of money on tons of shows. And, you know, I didn't necessarily think that the show was worth $20 million, but, you know, that doesn't mean that Amazon Prime wouldn't fund it. And, you know, if LSF was involved, maybe it would actually succeed. you know, maybe my involvement alone could uh make the the $20 million kind of investment worth it. Who knows? At least that's what I thought. Now, here comes the next part of the story when things get a little crazy. The next day, a major live streamer who was involved in the show, Extra Emily, said on her stream that she kind of saw all these comments about people calling it a scam and they even saw that, you know, LSF was involved and this was apparently uh unacceptable to her. so much so that she was considering kind of dropping out of the show or kind of looking into seeing seeing if kind of the whole thing was a scam or not. After seeing this, I brought the concerns to the organizers and the organizers told me that they were currently in talks with the agents to resolve this and they told me in no certain uncertain terms that the show was not cancelled and was still going on. So, me being somebody who didn't really have a lot of, you know, information into the situation and me, you know, trusting these high-powered agents who was who represent these multi-million dollar kind of celebrities, I trusted that they would kind of get to the bottom of this and kind of resolve these concerns quickly. During this time period, I saw and deleted a lot of unsubstantiated claims about the show and the mod team. There were accusations that I knew to be untrue such that, you know, the mod team had accepted bribes or, you know, had some sort of financial involvement with the show. And I knew they were not true because I was the one who had this entire this idea the entire time. You know, from start to finish, this happened a couple days. And what I can tell you for those who, you know, may not believe that for most moderators, I'm a highly paid software engineer working in San Francisco. I do not need to take a couple thousand dollar bribes from, you know, random internet scams. Okay? I was doing this because I legitimately, you know, care about the subreddit and that's why I spend my time on it. I thought it'd be kind of cool events for the for the sub. I'm talking about this in kind of the deleted comments because this is apparently some big no no in the Reddit to us or something or maybe it's like an unspoken rule where if you're involved in some sort of promotion and it ends up not working out or it ends up being a scam or something. You know, if you have deleted comments that have accused it of being a scam, well well that, you know, shows a cover up or some way it shows malice or bad faith or something. So that's why I'm kind of talking about this is because this was specifically a reason that was brought up regarding why I was kicked out as a mod on the on a live stream fail. And finally, I want to end this part of the story by talking about how Moist Critical made a video critical of the situation. And then about 30 minutes after this kind of video got released, uh I got reached out by the organizers of the events and told that five uh live streamers in the event had dropped out and that therefore the event was canceled and I should take down the post. In this video that Moist Critical had that was critical of the event. Most critical brought up points about how an image on the marketing page was AI generated or that the domain name was registered in Iceland or that basically just the the whole thing uh it it's it smelled it smelled bad. That's what he did. He did this this motion and he said it smelled bad. But beyond that, it doesn't seem like he did much research. I don't think that he reached out to any of the organizers. He certainly didn't reach out to me and I mean I don't know if he reached out to Mythic Talon or any of the streamers. Now I want to stop people here because this is very important and I think this is something that not a lot of people might have noticed and that important point is that nothing in this situation has yet to be definitively proven as a scam. I repeat, there is no definitive, at least to public information yet that anything fraudulent, malicious, or illegal has happened in the situation. The only confirmed things that we have right now is that I guess there was a website looked a little weird. There was some bad publicity. Everybody called it a scam and then a bunch of streamers dropped out and then the event got cancelled and everybody got refunded. None of this is illegal. None of this has proved to be a scam, at least yet. Maybe I'll eat these words. And yes, in retrospect, there are certainly some things which we could call yellow flags or even red flags. But that being said, I don't want people to go into this thinking that there was some proven mouse fee or something. uh when it there really is a possibility that a lot of this could have just been kind of bad organization and things just fell through. Just because something's a bad idea, just because something is misorganized, that doesn't mean that anything illegal happened. You know, I still haven't gotten confirmation about kind of the Amazon Prime kind of a thing. I think that that is the the biggest unknown right now is I don't know about this supposed Amazon Prime deal if it exists or not because maybe they were in negotiation with them. Maybe a contract was in the works but hadn't been signed yet. I'm not really sure yet. We'll have to see. And then kind of I'll end the story by talking about why I got removed as the top moderator. It's really not the secret or very surprising. I got removed directly for the post that I pinned to the top of the subreddit related to the the game show or supposed and alleged scam as well as kind of for deleting comments that were kind of critical of it. I also want to make a comment about kind of the Reddit code of conduct team as a whole. Reddit has all this flowery language about how kind of the code of conduct team is not here to punish you. It's kind of here to get you to act in good faith. It's here to kind of give you second chances and warnings and all of this stuff. And apparently all of that are lies because I was not given any second chances. I was not given very many very much kind of descriptive uh examples of kind of what I did wrong or kind of given any ability to kind of defend myself. I was just given a very vague description of yeah, there's accusations about some fraudulent scam that uh takes people's money and their PII, which means their their name, right? Cuz you have to sign up with your name to join a contest. And so I have infringed on the code of conduct by promoting a game show where you have to put in your your name or something, even though it hasn't really been proved to be fraudulent yet. And so, um, it's just it's a little disappointing. Now, here is the most important part of the video. Spez, this is a direct message to you and only you. I want to talk about how this whole situation is a direct result of the lack of support that Reddit, the company, gives to its moderators. Yeah, I did the partnership. Yeah, I didn't look into this as much as I should, and I trusted kind of agencies and live streamers when I should not have. And I did delete comments which I thought would have been borderline defamatory if the situation wasn't I guess a scam even though it technically hasn't been proven to be a scam yet. But despite all of that, there is still massive kind of like problems at Reddit the company due to the lack of support that caused this. But right before I go into the specific reasons of how this happened, I want to talk about why this matters in the first place. And this matters because Reddit moderators have power. They have influence. If you are one of the people who is joking about like internet janitor duties or whatever, I'm sorry to tell you it's funny jokes, but you are wrong. Reddit moderation does matter. Reddit moderators have control over millions of impressions per day and nobody seems to notice or care. Let's just talk about LSF. Think of all the streamer careers that have been created because of LSF. Think about the even larger number of streamer careers that have been destroyed because of LSF because some clip went viral about like something bad that they did. I have had major live streamers who are effectively celebrities come to me and beg to kind of remove, you know, negative posts about them. An even crazier story is a time when some Twitch employees found me in person and borderline begged me to make sure LSF is not used to destroy the multi-billion dollar company Twitch. partially because at the time LSF was indeed being used to destroy the multi-billion dollar company Twitch, deservedly so, by the way. Or even just take this literal circumstance. Imagine the whole kind of operation was legit. Well, guess what? One single post on LSF caused all of the streamers to drop out and destroyed a $20 million opportunity. Sorry, Mythic. My bad. Or imagine it was uh I guess a scam through and through. Well, guess what? We were the ones to expose it and destroy it before it had the chance to cause any real harm. I mean, everybody got refunded after all. Guess things ended up okay. Right or wrong, you can think I'm a good moderator or a bad moderator. You can think that LSF helps streamers or is the bane of their existence in the entire industry. But please don't for a single second pretend like it doesn't matter. And that's just one subreddit. Now, back to me. I was one of your most passionate users. I was in the Reddit partnership program from the start. I took advantage of every opportunity that I could. I had meetings with kind of the Reddit community managers. I begged them for help and kind of partnership opportunities at every chance that I could. And I was blown off every single time. I got nothing out of it. The community managers never helped me. As you know, nice as the guy was, I think he had basically no power to help me. I was one of the only moderators out there who tried to grow my community, who had any ambition, who tried to work with the company or help other subreddits or help the kind of the company that I didn't matter. I failed and it failed because of how mismanaged and how little support Reddit the company gives to moderators. So, let's circle back. Let's go back to the moderation situation. This is a very key important point. So, please pay attention. None of this would have happened if I had gotten support from Reddit. You think that I want to be the guy like going out like messaging random people in Discords and LinkedIns and trying to figure out kind of these partnerships? I don't. This is not my job. I am not qualified to do any of this. I am not a lawyer. I do not like I cannot read contracts to know what I should do or I should not do. I just want to like grow my subreddit, have a big vision, and I don't want to deal with this. At the end of the day, I'm a random nobody who got lucky. I took over one of your largest gaming subreddits on the platform because I won a stupid game of like Reddit mod politics. But apparently, I'm the only person out there who understands the potential that Reddit has. If Reddit had offered me partnerships, if Reddit had pipelines to connect with kind of major companies, if Reddit had lawyers that were helping me, like reading over these contracts, reading over these agreements, none of these very real mistakes that I made would have happened. And before you say it, I'm sure there's some employee at Reddit the company that says like, "Oh, yeah, we do. We do do that. That's that's my job. It's over here." Well, clearly you're not even doing 1% of what you should be doing because nobody uses these resources. Nobody cares. You are not doing enough. Multiply it by 100 and then let's talk. Reddit needs to be professionalized and it starts with the mods. This is going to be controversial, but the people who are running your multi-billion dollar website are unqualified nobodies like me. That doesn't mean it's my fault or their fault. It's your fault, Spez. Here's why. The controversial solution is uh just get rid of the the bad mods with better mods or paid mods or do takeovers or more rules or something like that. But there are better solutions. You can train them. You can give mods infrastructure or pipelines or resources or real kind of material support and treat them as if they have the actual power and influence that they actually have. and so communities can rise to the heights they truly could. And the Reddit moderator partner program is not it. Reddit moderators do not need one call with like one guy a month, as nice as he is, love you, Pablo, who has no power and no ability to affect anything. Reddit moderators don't need Christmas celebrations or special badges or community or events or team building exercises. No, even the I don't know the the Reddit event budget is barely useful. No, they need real material support. That means access to anything that like a talent manager would give an actual celebrity. So, an access to a bounty board or ad deals or lawyers or event organizers or professionals or anything that actually matters. To summarize, Reddit moderators should be treated like celebrities or influencers. Not because they deserve respect or anything, but because they actually have real power and influence. I mean, if not for the world, at least over your $50 billion company, maybe if you gave them actual support, it could go from 50 billion to 100 billion. I mean, it certainly deserves to be that high up for how much traffic Reddit gets. So, why haven't you solved this problem already, Spez? Is it because you're out of touch and you aren't aware of the problem? Is it because Reddit is a bloated mess and they can't ship products? No. I think the real issue is that Reddit is held hostage by the negativity and toxicity of its user base and it it doesn't really have the freedom to make bold and important and transformative decisions that could save the company. If you agree with anything that I said, well, you're in luck. I live in San Francisco and I would be happy to talk to you in person or any Reddit product manager or employee at all, you know, or on a call or something. That's my pitch to you, Spez. The rest is to the community. To the community. Spez and Reddit. They're almost certainly not going to fix any of this. All of this is up to us to solve. For anyone who this message has resonated with and wants to solve this problem, well, I have created a subreddit called r/suballiance. Suballiance will be a nonprofit volunteer community-based initiative to solve all of the problems that I have laid out. We will create tools and resources so good, so useful that everybody will have to work with us. Think talent agency but for subreddits. You have the big ideas. You have the vision. You have the crazy cool things that you want to do. And we handle the logistics. Materially, that means connections to major companies, uh, partnerships, doing AMAs, running events, doing mod recruitment, cross collaboration with other relevant subreddits, that kind of stuff. Go to r/suballiance and we will make it happen. The link will be in the description below. Reddit used to be a place where we did stuff. The phrase we did at Reddit, although used sarcastically, existed for a reason, and that is because we what we do, right or wrong, matters. Let's see what we can do to make it better. Thanks.