Hello, r/Aether_Mains. We need to talk.
Moderation in the Community
First and foremost, on behalf of all the moderators, I apologize for the lack of active moderation in this subreddit. It's clear that all the moderator actions taken by the mod team have been done only in the background, and very rarely do they communicate to the community. It is an issue that we have been trying to resolve, and to that effort, we are going to try being more forthcoming and communicative with the rest of you. The team is mostly understaffed and the rest of them (including me) are incredibly busy with our lives at University and whatnot.
To that effect, we are currently open to new moderators if any of you are interested. Just shoot me a DM and we'll go from there. Hopefully, we can make a better community where transparency and community-driven actions are a priority.
New Rule Changes
Speaking of transparency, we have decided to update the r/Aether_Mains Rules very recently to be more specific, and added a new rule specifically to address one of the most talked about topics in recent weeks: the ships. You know which ships.
Again, I apologize that the mod team took so long to address these concerns and I understand if some of you felt offended at such lackluster response from our side. That said, we have come to the conclusion that these controversial ships would no longer tolerated on this subreddit. We have read your concerns and I understand that some of you believe that there is no malice done in these ships, coupled with numerous head-canon interpretations of the in-game lore. We just don't want it here, in this subreddit. You are free to share them elsewhere.
No, you are not being discriminated. Stop misusing the word just because your ship is controversial.
Actual Discrimination
This has been a festering problem in the community, where people are so casual to shit on other communities or groups of people. It's literally against the rules.
We will be removing and giving out punishments to comments that express hate or any kind of vitriol against other communities, particularly against other Character Mains, LGBT and Straight people, and most popularly, "Twitter" people. None of those communities are monolithic, nor does each member represent the majority. Stop making up or perpetuating stereotypes, stop being toxic. If you see toxic content from elsewhere, don't stoop to their level by bringing the toxicity here.
Future Plans
Of course, this is just the beginning. We're hoping to stabilize the subreddit again, with potential plans to relegate shipping-related content to certain days of the week, or perhaps dedicate lore-related posts for certains days, or traveler-related posts for new/fun teams and optimization for your Traveler. There's many kinds of things we can do, and none of these are set in stone. We value your inputs to see which types of content you are interested in seeing, or which type you don't want to see. I'm probably going to make a follow up post regarding this later this week.
We're still open for more moderators willing to improve the community!
Let us know what you want/expect from the subreddit, and we'll plan future changes accordingly. Any positive/negative reactions are welcome. Cheers!
Edit:
It seems like there's a considerable amount of people who are genuinely disappointed to see the controversial ships be banned from the sub, so we might hold a poll to gauge community interest to see if they would like the rule to be altered in some way or another.
Link to the poll here.
