I was afraid of that (which is why I phrased it less definitively than I could have). Good to know!

The days of mild and fun conspiracy theories are over. The entire community has been fully consumed with qanon/maga/antisemitism insanity. Their minds are irrevocably broken.

It’s a shame. I grew up on xfiles and loved all the lore around the culture.

When the sub was put on probation, the post Reddit cited was justifying violence against slave owners. As far as I can tell, you just made up that they threatened Reddit admins.

Huffman has been a frequent attendee at Burning Man, the annual, clothing-optional festival in the Nevada desert, where artists mingle with moguls. He fell in love with one of its core principles, “radical self-reliance,” which he takes to mean “happy to help others, but not wanting to require others.” (Among survivalists, or “preppers,” as some call themselves, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, stands for “Foolishly Expecting Meaningful Aid.”) Huffman has calculated that, in the event of a disaster, he would seek out some form of community: “Being around other people is a good thing. I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove.”

Spez pretty openly fantasizes about owwning slaves

I wasn’t clear enough, what I meant wasn’t that the admins literally never said anything to the mods, I meant they made it relatively unclear what exactly they needed to do to stop getting warnings and eventually getting banned. no conversation, just relatively vague commands from down high also, as you can see in the SRD thread it was never made clear if they were removed for anything besides the john brown posting. However, even this is more clear communication than I remembered so I’ll admit fault on that at least.

funny thing I found browsing the thread is this comment about why chapo got banned, which mentions brigading, something people constantly accused/accuse hexbear users of doing:

…

The second aspect of this is that chapo is becoming so large that it is capable of effectively “brigading” threads without any direct co-ordination on the subreddit. By this I’m referring to stuff like the police dog situation, in which any meaningfully upvoted thread on /r/aww and other “cute” subreddits gets a shitload of “40%”, “ACAB”, and other anti-cop rhetoric. While screenshots of this often get posted to /r/chapotraphouse, the vast majority of the time this is AFTER the thread has already been “brigaded” by chapo users scrolling through /r/all or the specific “cute” subreddits. This behavior is not against the TOS, but it is incredibly annoying to /r/aww mods and therefore concerning to the admins, because the “cute” subreddits are the easiest to manage and please, and more importantly, the most advertiser friendly. When chapo users fuck that up, there’s a problem.

…

sounds familiar doesn’t it?

Maybe because you didn’t observe it happening.

I did, actually. I made some of the John Brown posts lol.

Reddit admins were busy as hell cleaning the place up. All kinds of rightwing subs like some of the incel gathering spots. Some for straight up Nazis like frenworld or whatever it was where they were using honk honk as code for heil Hitler. When the admins made site changes due to complaints about right wing subs, Chapo made the list because they engaged in similar activities with the main complaint being brigading other subs.

Brigading is not an activity similar to supporting incels or Nazis.

I remember the subreddit mods sharing their attempts to communicate with admins on this, offering to make whatever changes would be needed, and getting stonewalled. The subreddit itself adopted a no-brigading policy and included it with an pinned automod comment on every post.

But this is neither here nor there because the ban announcement said nothing about brigading. Instead, they said it was about content violating their new anti-hate policy and a vague statement about mods not “reining” in users. Prior communications and the timeline suggested the only content violations were anti-slavery posts.

Their mods refused to change to meet the new rules.

How so?

The admins eventually removed some of the mods.

Which ones and why?

They still refused to change afterward

Such as?

The reality is that most of this was actually opaque.