Very early in August, the mods of r/animemes decided, suddenly and without community involvement, to change the rules of their subreddit and ban the use of the word "trap" as a transphobic slur, despite the fact that it is generally used in reference to male identifying crossdressers who gain amusement or sexual gratification from confusing others as to their gender, and NOT as a term for trans people. The logic given to justify the ban anyway was that some people call trans people traps anyway, despite this being a clear misuse of the word. Users were told to just call them femboys instead. The obvious point that if this became the new common parlance term for traps, transphobes would simply call trans people THAT instead, and on and on and on in a neverending treadmill of word bans, was raised numerous times and largely ignored by the mods and their supporters, as was the point that trying to pigeonhole traps into the trans umbrella reinforces rigid gender roles and invalidates the idea that an effeminate man can still be a man.

From the beginning, it was clear that the overwhelming majority of the sub, roughly 94% based on many polls and voting totals, was staunchly against the trap ban and did not agree that the word was transphobic. Numerous transgender posters and self-identifying traps weighed in to express disagreement with the ban. Mods refused to budge.

It quickly became clear to the userbase that external subreddits, foremost r/traa, were heavily involved in persuading the mods to take this action. Users from these places were brigading r/animemes to support the mods and argue with anti-ban users, frequently calling users names, condescending to them, or otherwise breaking the sub's rules on civil discourse with no action from the mods. Meanwhile, multiple mods were caught themselves going to these subs to gloat and grandstand about the ban, calling their own community bigots, chuds, and similar, and clearly inciting the brigades.

At this point, what began as an organic outpouring of argument against the ban became a campaign, a deliberate effort, through memes and upvotes, to fill the front page of the sub with pro-trap and anti-mod posts as a form of protest, and the rest of Reddit began to notice and get involved.

Now, I can think of no more tried and true, nor more universally understood to be valid, form of protest than the simple act of mass-speaking. Of a large group of people gathering in a public place with signs and slogans, making noise and occupying that space until their demands are met. This is the fundamental theory behind strikes, marches, sit-ins, and most other common forms of protest. Peaceful disruption to force those in authority to hear you, and to remind them of your numbers and ability to grind activity to a halt until your grievances are redressed. What happened on Animemes was merely the digital equivalent thereof, the occupation of the space by protesters. And what's more, the simple structure of reddit guarantees such a protest to be completely bottom-up rather than top-down, and democratic in nature. Only the majority can occupy a subreddit in such a way, as a preponderance of downvotes can end the visibility of their occupation at any time. Vocal minorities cannot hold communities hostage with this tactic, nor does a community fighting its moderators have access to any back-end tools that can advantage their messages in the market of ideas. As large subreddits usually have organized mod teams with private discord or slack channels, grassroots rebellions of this nature also at least start out with an organizational disadvantage as well.

And while it's certainly true that many users became involved in the revolt who do not normally post on the sub, myself included, this was happening on both sides, and any accusation of brigading becomes moot after a sub's own mods go to other communities to gin up support. It cannot be valid for one side to receive external help, but not the other. There is also almost no possibility that external influence changed the grassroots, democratic nature of the revolution, as the external posters were coming in from both sides and likely cancelled out, and moreover because this was a HUGE SUB, frequently fielding thousands and thousands of actives at a time. Even if T_D still existed on reddit, it wouldn't have had the numbers to camp on a sub that size and overwhelm its native community by 90+% voting margins, there simply is no culture war community on reddit that DOES. The vast majority of participation and voting was clearly ordinary users of the sub.

Once the revolution was in full swing, the sub moderators began a series of clearly bad faith actions to attempt to stop it, exacerbating the problem each time. First, the largely absentee head mod returned and promised to listen to the community...but then put out a corporate-style apology full of vague, non-specific promises of community involvement in future rules changes and publicly accepted the resignation of the #2 mod who had most famously insulted the community in other subs...but refused to revert the trap ban, and shortly began talking about hiring more mods, causing users to conclude the "resigned" mod would just be back on an alt anyway and nothing had changed. Then mods began shadowbanning users...which is not something mods can do directly in the sense that admins can, but they can simulate the functionality of a shadowban exactly by setting a bot to remove a user's posts instantly and without them being able to see the post as removed (this action would further invalidate any claim that the revolution was the work of outside brigaders, as we could no longer participate and the revolution only gained steam anyway, especially when users noticed that the claim it was simply a filter against people with no posting history on the sub, as the r/traa brigaders were still able to participate, showing that who got shadowbanned was ideologically based). When this didn't work, mods began stealth editing other rules to give themselves justifications to remove pro-revolution content and ban users for it, blatantly breaking the previous promise that no future rules changes would happen without community involvement. After this was discovered and widely called out, the mods issued a "clarifications" announcement that was automatically stickied in every new post to try and force users to read it, denying they were doing the things they blatantly were doing. They also locked this post from the outset, preventing users from offering any rebuttal. After this, the mods for the most part went radio silent for a long period, though a couple who opposed the trap ban but didn't have enough power on the team to overrule it, kept open lines of communication.

While this was going on, a new sub, r/goodanimemes, was created and began to grow rapidly as a replacement for the original, the only true way to attack a moderator's absolute power over their subreddit, create a replacement and let the community migrate to get away from the unpopular mods (and unlike the founding of resetera, this happened organically, without anybody knocking the original sub offline to make it look dead and force people to look for a new home), no different except without the trap ban, and with a promise that no rules changes would occur without community vote. As soon as it began to gain steam, the subscriber count of r/animemes began to drop rapidly, falling faster with every further mod screwup. The drop was most precipitous in the day or two immediately following the stealth edits to the rules, maintaining for that period upwards of 1000 unsubs per hour. In total, roughly 130,000 people unsubscribed from r/animemes in a two week period, and r/goodanimemes grew by about 200,000 users, from nothing. r/goodanimemes currently sits at around 240k, but is most tellingly receiving upvote totals per post around r/animemes peak numbers, suggesting that nearly the entirety of r/animemes active userbase has moved over to r/goodanimemes...like any 7 year old subreddit, its actual subscriber count is likely heavily bloated with inactive accounts and users who lost interest in the sub but never bothered to unsub from it.

Further, by the end of the revolution, memes were frequently reaching the front page of animemes with under 500 upvotes, but the content was still wall to wall pro-revolution, everybody was simply leaving, decamping to the new sub, and there was no meaningful number of people waiting to take the old sub back once the revolution spam began to wane. But perhaps the clearest evidence of all that the native community of animemes was almost entirely against the trap ban is that to my knowledge, even with animemes now shut down, no new sub has formed as a competitor to goodanimemes WITH the trap ban. There is no split community here, there is no meaningful audience for a version of animemes with the trap ban.

After roughly a week in a holding pattern with animemes subs rapidly dropping and goodanimemes rapidly growing, the mods made a final heavy push to end the revolution and retake the sub, organizing a raid on their own sub on discord to downvote revolution memes and upvote pro-mod memes. It didn't work, not even close, the revolution posters outmatched them severalfold on votes and the raid was an abject failure. Shortly after this, several mods left in rapid succession, apparently giving up on the sub, while others claimed to have been doxxed. I've seen the dox, it exists, though I can't speak to its legitimacy. I won't discuss any of the details here, obviously, and nor should anyone else, but I WILL talk for a moment about the alleged doxxer. Never have I seen a more stereotypical rendition of what SJWs think anti-SJWs are like. This purported person is a literal fedora neckbeard whose profile reads "fuck trannies and niggers", and whose message is in the form of a ransom notice with threats of SWATting and doxxing of family members (neither of these things appear to have ever occurred, AFAIK), it essentially reads as though these mods were doxxed by the terrorist version of GamerGate that exists on Law & Order SVU. Between the over the top nature of this, the fact that by this point the revolution had nothing to gain from doxxing mods and only stood to look bad due to it, and the fact that an immediate effort was made to pin the blame for it on r/goodanimemes (despite that it was never posted there, or if it was it got taken down lightning fast by their mods, nor is there any indication the doxxer has a connection to the sub), I consider it likely this was a false flag by the mods themselves in a final effort to stop the revolution by getting goodanimemes banned and thus hoping to force users back onto animemes, but it also failed, though the admins did force the goodanimemes mods to implement a rule banning all mention of animemes even though goodanimemes did nothing wrong.

A few days after this...so clearly not in fear of the doxxer or in any kneejerk response to the dox, but only after it was clear this would not result in goodanimemes being taken down, animemes went private and several more mods left. Though it is officially "on haitus", mods who continued answering questions about it consider it likely dead for good. It's worth pointing out that though the doxxer's demands have not been met, he has disappeared and not followed through on any of his threats of further doxxings, providing more evidence that this was a false flag.

The revolution gained an unqualified victory, despite that the mods had every conceivable advantage except numbers, including the clear sympathies of the admins, and moreover repeatedly broke their own rules and promises and otherwise acted dishonestly, and in practice has migrated the entire community to a virtually identical subreddit while the mods sit atop a worthless pile of ash. One of the mods famously boasted they would not relent even if they lost 10k subs, which clearly at the time they considered a high estimate. In the end they lost 13x that many. While money was not involved, I consider this about as stark an example of Get Woke Go Broke as one can possibly get. This entire broad, massive community, acting with near-unity, rejected woke demands and de-facto kicked out their own mods in the manner of the Simpsons' "no Homers club". The whole thing strikes me as a microcosm of the culture war entirely in fact, in which the SJW side controls the institutions completely, has every conceivable advantage except numbers, and is held to no rules, not even the ones they themselves make and demand of others, while the anti-SJW side is just grassroots people with no power who are frustrated with the fact they were minding their own business, and one day out of the blue the powers that be deemed them horrible bigots and started demanding they change all their social norms in response in an obvious slippery slope. Of course, it's much easier to migrate a subreddit to another subreddit than to rebuild around billion dollar media conglomerates, which is why this event took about two weeks and the culture war has been ongoing for many years, but like I said, microcosm.

As a closing note, I'd also just point out that the animemes/goodanimemes community was, and as far as I can tell still is, predominately left wing. Despite attempts to falsely label goodanimemes a hate sub, including overt threats to sic r/AgainstHateSubreddits on them, they are not hateful or even politically incorrect people. They seem to be very pro-trans and in favor of rules against hate speech, they simply don't agree with defining hate speech and slurs in overbroad ways that will obviously just begin a cycle of ceding word after word to transphobes in the vein of allowing /pol/ to take ownership of Pepe the Frog or the OK gesture. In fact, the idea that a bunch of people who are clearly fapping to gender-bending anime characters are by and large transphobes is...fairly silly on its face. However, I imagine that these events have created tens if not hundreds of thousands of new anti-SJWs among them...so thanks for that animemes mods, you're the best recruiters my side could ever ask for.