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.
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.