Copy of the post in the event it is deleted or you don't want to give ****it any traffic.
Hey again, /r/PICS!
We have another interesting development for you: /u/ModCodeofConduct still hasn't responded to our request for a public reply... but they have seen fit to threaten us:
This is a final warning for inaccurately labeling your community NSFW which is a violation of the Mod Code of Conduct rule 2. Your subreddit has not historically been considered NSFW nor would they under our current policies.
Please immediately correct the NSFW labeling on your subreddit. Failure to do so will result in action being taken on your moderator team by the end of this week. This means moderators involved in this activity will be removed from this mod team. Moderators may also be subject to additional actions, e.g., losing the ability to join mod teams in the future.
Lastly, if you suddenly begin to post, or approve content that features sexually explicit content to your community in order to justify the NSFW label, we will immediately remove and permanently suspend moderators who have participated in this action.
Needless to say, we responded as you would expect:
Please read and publicly respond to our message addressing this.
We are not in violation of the cited rule as it is written. Moreover, according to Reddit's listed policies, our subreddit is considered NSFW. If these policies are themselves in error, please correct their verbiage immediately. Otherwise, /r/PICS reverting to SFW would itself be in violation of those same policies.
Our team is currently discussing our actions in the meantime. Please permit us some time to reach a consensus.
Maddeningly, /u/ModCodeofConduct is telling us to go against Reddit's listed guidelines, which puts us in something of a pickle: If we follow their commands, we'll be in violation of the site-wide rules... but if adhere to said rules, they'll remove us. /r/InterestingAsFuck is still unmoderated (at the time of this writing), so we can reasonably assume that our removal would effectively kill this community.
Well, we don't want /r/PICS to die, so while we figure out how best to handle the situation (which includes waiting for a public, user-visible response from /u/ModCodeofConduct), we're going to be exploring new ways of ensuring that innocent, unsuspecting users are not presented with offensive content. One possible avenue would see you โ yes, you, the upstanding Redditor reading this โ having the ability to tag any post that you personally found offensive.
If you have any other ideas, please share them in the comments!
Sorry for the confusion, /r/PICS! We'll get back to you with more soon!
Some mods tried to have their cake and eat it too, AKA they reopened their subs but wanted to keep protesting, but nothing too extreme as to not get kicked. So some teams decided to make it so users could continue posting but only about comedian John Oliver.
A lot of users were on board because they saw it as a meme (driving some to create high effort John Oliver themed posts with a lot of engagement, the complete oppossite of the "intention"), and most eventually returned to business as usual, just with some picture of John Oliver somewhere in the post. Just look at r/aww who claim to still be protesting but most of their posts are just the usual cute animals but with a picture of John Oliver next to them.
Ah ok. So it's just a random meme. For the longest time I thought John Oliver was someone important to reddit and they were making fun of him ๐ I wonder how John Oliver feels about all the random meeting about him. I had never heard of him before this.
He has a show LastWeekTonight where every week he shines a spotlight on how the world, usually America (many, many, many times America), is fucked up. By using him as a mascot they are hoping he will feature Reddit on his next episode. And he definitely will. This is exactly in his wheelhouse. He's also known to do publicity stunts.
They post the full episodes on their YouTube for free awareness. Go check them out.