What the heck happened to last week!? A Q&A.

Last Wednesday there was a huge invasion of members of the quarantined sub /r/ ChapoTrapHouse (CTH) posting all kinds of anti-Obama and troll posts and comments.

Why then?

The top mod of , who is an active member of CTH, did a post to CTH inviting CTH members to brigade .

Couldn't you do anything?

Not really. He was the top moderator.

Why didn't the reddit admins act? Isn't brigading against reddit rules?

Despite several users reporting the problem it took quite awhile to get their attention, and even longer for them to take action. The admins started taking action late Friday afternoon.

So what did the admins do?

The admins removed the top mod for violating moderation guidelines. Plus they removed all the other mods from CTH he had added. They also deleted the post at CTH.

Sorry, this post was removed by Reddit's Legal Operations team. This content was removed for a violation of Reddit's Content Policy .

Why was he the top mod?

Some reddit history:

In the very beginning reddit had no subreddits. When they finally started adding subs, was one of the first subs. Back then folks became moderators either by being added by an existing mod or because they were a very active participant in the sub. That's how I became a mod of /Obama. I didn't even get a PM telling me I was a mod. I just noticed I was a mod on my user page one day.

When I became a mod there were 7-10 users above me that were active users and moderators so I really didn't need to do any moderation in the sub. Eventually there were about 5-8 more below me. But sometime after Obama's second inauguration I noticed some of those mods were drifting away and demodding themselves. Some of them even left reddit completely.

Eventually about 4-5 years ago I noticed that there was only one other user who was really looking after the sub so I started more actively modding /Obama. That mod eventually drifted away too, so I've been the only active mod for for awhile.

And the (former) top mod? He was the last mod remaining above me, but I'd had never seen him do any real moderation tasks in at least five years.

So what happened after the admins acted?

I was left as the top mod.

I then tried to restore /Obama to pre-brigade status. I deleted all the CTH posts, locked them, and then deleted everyone's comments to those posts.

So the sub is back to the way it was?

More or less.

But there were about 400 new subscribers to the sub in 3 days (and around 150 unsubscribes), likely almost all CTH members (daily subscriptions to /Obama usually range from 5-50 per day). The sub is also seeing elevated pageviews, but not as many as the first couple of days.

There haven't been any more CTH shitposts, but there has been significantly more downvoting in the sub the last few days. Posts used to usually get 90-97% upvotes, but now posts range from 55-80% upvotes.

Can I do anything to help?

Upvote the posts you think should be upvoted.

Plus I can't check everything, so please report any posts that violate this sub's or reddit rules.

BUT REMEMBER THE REPORT LINK IS NOT A SUPER-DOWNVOTE. Do not report something just because you disagree with it.

Now back to your regularly scheduled program.

Update: 29 June 2020

CTH just got banned (as well as ).

175

Traffic is down over a third from last year. And way down from the sub's high point. There's very rarely at least a dozen users in this sub at one time.

Surprisingly there are still new subscribers, but net subscriptions is very rarely over 5/day.

The only folks who post to this sub besides me are trolls (who apparently think "What is Obama's last name?" is funny and original and are usually associated with a small set of non-sequitur meme subs — I assume it gets discussed in a discord channel).

Posts rarely get 4 comments, with half often troll comments.

Posts rarely get more than 50 upvotes where even 6-12 months ago over 150 upvotes was fairly common. Which is actually pretty amazing — it means 50-80% of unique visitors have voted on that post.

So comment down below. I'm looking for a consensus opinion. Should be turned private or just closed to new submissions?

If you want to help keep the sub going, look for interesting articles to post. You can start here:

Or, for awhile I was posting an official Obama photo a day from Flickr archives. Those usually got a good response.

It might be nice to see some of his old speeches posted, but

From the posting rules in this sub’s sidebar:

Only videos of Barack Obama's speeches and interviews from original sources (such as C-SPAN or WH.gov). No rehosted videos. No other videos. No animated GIFs.