Excuse me but are you a meme hater? Let me preface this by saying that I've been a memer since they first appeared on 4chan circa 2006 (ages ago in internet time). I remember refreshing /b/ all afternoon with the hope that someone would make a new meme. I was a memer back when Advice Dog was the only one and I still upvote every Advice Dog meme I see becasue of the fond rush of nostalgia it brings me. Nowadays, there are many thousand on livememe and other meme websites. I was a memer back before memegenerator was created (the first meme website) and I had to make them with MS Powerpoint or Paint. Speaking of meme websites, I was one of the first submitters to memebase.com and still have one of the top accounts there despite having migrated to reddit nearly 2 years ago. It was on 4chan and memebase where I cut my teeth creating memes, way before I had a reddit account and way before/r/adviceanimals[1] was created in late 2010. Back before I could get any sort of points or even username recognition, I was creating memes as a clever and easily digestible way to reflect on society, relate some story to my audience, or just be funny. Do you remember rich raven? No? I do. You probably don't remember depression dog, crazy girlfriend praying mantis, introspective pug, or friendzone Johnny either. I remember all of them. In fact, you've never even submitted to /r/adviceanimals[2] . So please, respect my judgement regarding the direction of the subreddit and the integrity of posts I have held dear to my heart for nearly 7 years but you have no strong feelings for.
I'm trying to be as civil as possible amidst a subreddit invasion, the likes of which you are unlikely to have ever seen. We have 43 subscribers subscribers and provocations like this tend to spread to the major griefer subreddits and cause extreme problems that at times, have escalated to reddit admins with discussions with about contacting the FBI due to reddit global denial of service attacks. The unserious attitude of your junior mods isn't helping, and they continue to pelt me with off-topic banter about movies and TV even within the last 20 minutes, a day later. Our own moderators have a policy to conduct all internal discussions on a separate thread from a modmail user complaint, so only specifically relevant, targeted messages reach outside redditors. So I'd appreciate it if your mods would cut me off their discussion thread, now that you have taken action.
I would like you to understand what's going on here. I'm not some young kid drunk on power as a moderator who is flying off the handle. I'm 54 years old and i've been moderating forums since the early 1980's. I have seen it all before. Our subreddit gets a lot of shit, and yes, there are a lot of young, inexperienced, socially maladapted kids who complain about memes. It's our mission to help them and educate them about memes, verticals, and such, to help them adopt more healthy attitudes (about memes specifically). But we can't do that when outside subreddits are intentionally making a hostile environment, where people can't discuss their penguin or duck memes openly or honestly. The post that got attacked by your users was a young kid, trying to find his way in the AdviceAnimals world, and honestly admitting he screwed up. His message was an example for others, to help them avoid similar screwups. These attacks from your subreddit singled him out, which has a chilling effect on other users who now see how hostile the environment can be when someone speaks openly about their memes. So when a user like you singles out an individual for ridicule, and incites other groups like /r/AntiMeme[3] to engage with it, it draws in the most notorious griefers on reddit, like /r/ShitRedditSays[4] and worse. The collateral damage includes attacks on almost all other current threads, which takes days to moderate and calm down. Sometimes it even attracts determined griefers who become permanent problems. IMHO, there is a big difference between posts that deliberately incite trouble in a top 20 subreddit like ours, and poking fun at an obscure subreddit like /r/RandomActsOfBlowJob[5] . Since this has been a repeated problem, and it seems like certain users are constantly scanning /r/AdviceAnimals[6] for material to hate on, I would greatly appreciate if you could look more closely at these posts and in the future, try to understand the meme. Consider this problem might be representative of a bad tendency of yours, provoked by minority bullies that you would like to eliminate just as much as we do.
Thanks.