Hey everyone, its been a while since I had to do a mod post and it likely wont make much of difference but I thought that Id be a bit more openly transparent about what gets removed and why.
First: This sub has grown substantially from even a year ago and has over 325K subscribers. With that, there is over 1000 posts per week and over 60,000 comments in a month. You are all amazing and I love seeing cards and collections shared as well as helping people coming back to the hobby.
Second: With a sub this size about a specific popular fandom, there will be some bad actors who mix in to try astroturfing, trolling, or just causing chaos because they want the world to burn. Mods are always vigilant to try taking care of this right away and rely on reports from users to review things we miss. We work with reddit's tools to flag accounts and remove things as quickly and seamlessly as possible. (Apologies if you are one of the people who gets caught offguard by the troll who creates accounts that get banned in 5min only to spam nsfw cards, please report them asap.)
So with all this I wanted to share that there has been a large uptick in accounts that try to act like they arent just here to advertise their own intentions. This ranges from shops, companies, and investors who are trying cause price spikes. Here is a reasonable article (I dont agree with some parts but they go into detail of buyouts) that is worth looking over . Mods have noticed that many of these accounts post asking about why prices are jumping to drive FOMO and hype and once prices seem to jump those accounts delete or do not continue posting. I am doing what I can to not let the sub play into these posts and make sure to review the posts and comments thoroughly, if someone is posting about buyouts prices and jumping values like they have been living under a rock "What is happening with these cards?!" they are likely part of it.
This is also happening for some companies who try to drive engagement through seemingly shill accounts. A lot of these posts are locked or removed for the likelihood of selfpromotion. Promotion is taken seriously and anyone who is pushing their own products, using personal watermarks, or linking to articles that they are involved in has a high chance of being banned regardless of how amazing their work is.
Some people are upset that their posts get autoremoved when asking about values/authenticity/specific card grading when they dont think they posted against the rules. I'll tell you right now, 90% of the time it is correctly removed. Mods have triggers set so that specific post types dont overrun the sub daily since there are better subs for them and there are so many posts of the exact same thing. are some of the big ones that are very helpful for these posts.
You are all welcome here provided you treat others (including other subs) with respect, remember that this is an all ages sub, and are following the sub rules to the best of your ability. Doxxing sellers is still not allowed as well.
TLDR: Likely posts and comments from shills are removed and the rest removed is to keep spam down. If someone is pushing reports of a buyout, dont trust them to not be part of it trying to drive more hype. Also mods seem to be on top of moderating for now but use reports often if something is wrong.
Keep on being great everyone! Dont let the "investors" win by buying into the hype, be smart with your money.
Feel free to comment or complain in the comments, always happy to interact with everyone.