Late Wednesday, all human moderators of Reddit’s r/art subreddit quit en masse, leaving the 30-million-member community locked and bot-run with no new posts allowed. The trigger was Clay’s ban under Rule 9, which strictly prohibits any mention of sales, commissions, or prints to keep focus on art critique. Clay shared screenshots of the curt mod response and his locked view of the pinned resignation notice, calling it absurd while selling prints of the moment. The episode exposed ongoing frustrations in online art communities over rigid rules and moderator decisions.
I don’t think Reddit’s global rules prohibit sales. Otherwise, all the porn subreddits promoting OnlyFans would’ve been nuked. /r/art’s own rules prohibit sales, as seen here:
IMHO, this rule is a bit extreme but it isn’t without reason. Without this rule, the subreddit would be flooded with people trying to sell art. Selling art isn’t a problem, but if the entire subreddit is just people trying to sell their own artwork, then the community will just turn into FB Marketplace. And I would imagine the users wouldn’t like that.
The issue isn’t the rule. The issue is that the mods are powertripping assholes who just outright banned the dude and purged his entire post history on /r/art.
Something doesn’t add up here. Because it was a human mod who was an asshole to the guy. Did he quit as well, in protest of his own behavior?
It was the one mod that powertripped crashing out because of the backlash and demoting everyone else before himself, according to another comment.
Because the entire mod team resigned, it could either be:
I don’t think it was a protest from the other mods against the powertripping one as I don’t know how resigning is going to do anything useful. It’s more likely that this incident invited a lot of people to the subreddit and the mods just got tired of dealing with it. And because mods can’t close the subreddits like they did in 2023 anymore without Reddit’s permission, they all just resigned or the top mod just purged everyone.
It was the one mod that powertripped crashing out and demoting everyone else before himself, according to another comment.