Here we are again. I tried to just walk away but a lot of things brought me back. Maybe it was the dox posted earlier today (thanks for telling everyone where my young niece goes to school, I'm sure that's helpful). Maybe it was just a need to quench everyone's thirst for information and get shit on by reddit mods some more. Either way, I'm back and here to reveal some truths. Oh, and as for the dox, I've got a pretty good idea of who posted it. Here's a tip: Don't include information that has only been revealed to a single person. It makes it easy for me. As always, questions and stuff should be sent to twitter.com/XavierMendel.

First off, let's talk about something called /r/Stuff. It was a plan between moderators and admins to manipulate the front page and various subreddits to create a default community entirely to our specifications.

A while back, me and some other moderators in Modtalk started discussing this idea of recreating /r/Reddit.com (a catch-all default subreddit). We had /r/misc and /r/self, but they were deemed not good enough. So we went to some admins with the idea and got a couple involved. We got everything we wanted: guaranteed quick default status, free advertisements (here's our mockup sidebar ad: http://puu.sh/gIGrE/28ecd3f324.png), and their seal of approval. Of course, we had to keep everything quiet. This began /r/Stuff.

Through some skype and mumble calls, plus meetings on Snoonet's #Stuff IRC room, we created everything from the rules and ban lists (published below), lists of trusted moderators (published below), subreddits we could rely on for linking/etc (published and expanded below), and more. We needed subreddits and its mods for our strategy, which was to plug /r/Stuff in every big subreddit we could. Submissions, sidebar, stickies, whatever we could do. Whether it was against the rules or not we would make it known and make sure the mods were cool with ignoring that. Normally such a campaign would be against reddit's spamming rules, but again, we were acting above the rules. Coincidentally, we even used the #Stuff IRC to post #Modtalk logs sometimes. By using such a massive hidden network of moderators we could manipulate the entire community quite easily.

Anyway. We had everything figured out. CSS mods, mods who knew everyone, mods who had good connections with admins, admins themselves, mods who worked with bots and stuff, experienced automoderator people, all that. Essentially, we were colluding with everyone to create the perfect subreddit (in one view, anyway) for the quickest default status and a chance to completely own a new default subreddit. The rules themselves were pretty simple. We mostly just took a few rules we liked from subreddits we moderated and put them together. No memes, no soapboxing/personal army/etc, no bigoted/abusive comments or posts, no sob stories, that sort of thing. Of course, we had an understanding that these were more like guidelines than actual rules. They always are. Some mods wanted a more censored approach, some wanted a more hands-off approach. My plan was separate from others. I was going to use /r/Stuff as a way of changing the mod community by experimenting with my ideas that they considered extremist or downright wrong. Justifying bans, not shadowbanning everyone, treating users as people rather than inferiors, stuff like that. It was easy to talk my way into the top mod spot, which made the plan possible. Otherwise one of the others would've banned me the moment any of those ideas were brought up.

There were two wrenches thrown into this that fucked it all up. One was the admins not getting back to us quickly. It lead to a lot of downtime and apathy over the project, and doing it alone wasn't an option. The second was GamerGate. Everything was on track up until August, then a lot happened. For what happened with /r/Games, the project with me could not continue. It was essentially dead.

I said we started off with a ban list. Here's the first revision: http://a.pomf.se/ayfsms.txt

It contains automoderator bans from /r/Games, /r/ReactionGifs, and /r/News. Other subreddits involved were to be added later. They've been formatted as double spaced usernames here (with /u/) for simplicity's sake. Regular bans (ones where users are aware of the ban) are not included.

Here's the list of all the people involved: http://a.pomf.se/zsfmvt.txt

The top section is just the mods we had formally added to the /r/Stuff mod list at the time. The one below was a list that was pending for that spot. The third is a list of the admins we relied on for different things. The fourth was a list of subreddits with the moderators who were a part of our general group and could be relied on to do what we asked. Subs marked with "everybody", obviously, are subreddits with a large majority of mods in our group. The last section is outside contacts who, while not really a part of our group could be relied on for a job. The last two names were moderators we trusted to perform CSS development.

Here's a spreadsheet with some more specific names from subreddits: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LxLhPGrlJWcpW96qgP0jQ8KSgVnqc8tCiRjXdLa5E-E

The first worksheet (switch at the bottom) is sorted by subreddit. It shows a quick overview of which of us and our trusted friends were in which subreddits. Green rows means we know essentially everyone, yellow means we need to gain more people there.

The second worksheet is sorted by moderator. It shows the standard group, without branching off, minus the current moderators. The reliable column mostly means "willing to do the things we do if we ask", and SFWPorn means what it says. Most of the focus on this project was around the SFWPorn network, such as /r/EarthPorn, /r/HistoryPorn, and whatnot. If they moderated a SFWPorn subreddit it was a huge bonus. The final columns are subreddits they moderate with any sort of significance. Some big subs aren't shown because it didn't matter that much.