The subreddit r/steam, about the digital game storefront, received as many other subreddits a notice to open the community again, or else the mods would be replaced by those who abide.
The mods followed suit posting the following automod message under every new post:
As ya'll likely know, we've been dark to support the blackout against reddit's antagonistic behavior towards its own userbase. The admins sent us a message today saying we must open or get removed, so here we are.
For those of you browsing this subreddit on non-official apps (Reddit is Fun, Apollo, Sync, Boost, etc), they will break on July 1st due to reddit's new policies. We're opening back up but will leave permanent stickies in the subreddit and threads to keep folks in the know.
Our Discord [contains link to https://discord.gg/steam] server is active, don't forget to check it out.
Good luck and god speed.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
On visit, you quickly notice there is a community wide effort to focus on the literal topic of the given name and post about vapors, steam trains, and kitchen appliances. While posts about the gaming platform get downvoted.
To try and be charitable to the WPT mods: that sub is a magnet for bots and bad actors. All those measures sound like a shotgun approach to combating spam to me.
I really don't envy having to moderate a large politically oriented sub like that. I imagine it burns you out fast to being open and fair-minded in how you approach moderation due to the sheer avalanche of bullshit you're confronted with cleaning up.
I do understand that point of view, but the fact that they're piloting a really invasive tool on behalf of the admins and subsequently refused to go black -- these make me feel far less charitable
Combating bots by banning anyone without an email is understandable and seems doable for the near future, but like it would mostly be a hiccup for the people churning them out.
Google ignores any periods in an email address, so if you want to sign up with the same email all you have to do is fill it with differently-placed periods. What are they gonna do? Ban everyone who shares your name from having a reddit? Ban Gmail? If they did, there's still the plus trick that isn't specific to gmail
The plus and period thing isn't difficult to filter out in their email check.
But I do agree that requiring emails is a non-issue for spammers.
I mean, look at any other platform that requires email, and they're all covered in spam.