Reddit's /r/piracy section, a sub-Reddit dedicated to piracy discussion, is starting to resume its normal operation after it was shut down on Monday following a dispute that nearly resulted into mutiny.
A now-former moderator behind the name Samewhiterabbits allegedly violated policy by using the sub-Reddit to support its own agenda. The user has reportedly been launching, promoting, and heavily spamming the subsection with links to his own streaming website projects, one of the moderators named Dysgraphical said as cited by Torrent Freak.
"Samewhiterabbits is using /r/Piracy as a platform to spam his monetized website forks which he claims as official," Dysgraphical said in a statement. "This isn't recent activity but rather his model."
Samewhiterabbits is reportedly monetizing from streaming sites that were shut down by spamming his new domain as the new home of the dead site. He also explicitly gets rid of competing stream sites and uses different accounts to spam.
After another spam post surfaced, /r/piracy moderators including Dysgraphical and TheWalkingTroll decided to intervene, but they were met with resistance from Samewhiterabbit who also had moderator powers. Samewhiterabbit held 'hostage' several popular threads by locking or removing them to censor any mention of his modus operandi and prevented other moderators from stopping the wave of misleading spam.
With limited access, the team decided to fix the problem by temporarily making the sub-Reddit private and applied for more power to remove the errant moderator from the team.
"A few of us now have full permissions. Thankfully the admins were rather quick in their response (given they can take several days) and we got this sorted quickly," Dysgraphical said.
Now, Samewhiterabbits is banned from the /r/piracy and the sub-Reddit is starting to get normal again.
Reddit is one of the most popular sources of news on the Internet, and its subsection /r/piracy has nearly 100,000 subscribers.