Some of you who've read my posts/tweets in the past may know I'm no stranger to getting harrassed by reddit mods, but for Hayden Clay they took it to another level.
It started out with Hayden sharing his work on the /r/art sureddit, a commenter had asked for more information about a particular artwork to which Hayden had mentioned that he has a whole mini-series surrounding it and that it's also available in print. Implying available for purchase to anyone interested. Bear in mind, this was in the comment section with a different reddit user being the one asking for more information. Apparently, this triggered some reddit mod because they're very strict on self-promotion in that subreddit, so the simple word "print" triggered a subreddit ban on Hayden, meaning he won't be able to post there ever again. Quite brutal if you ask me, usually you'd maybe give the person a warning or only delete the post, not straight up ban the user completely, but maybe the mod was having a bad day so Hayden decided to ask the moderation team:
Wow. I mean, I've had similar confrontations with mods, but this one took it quite far. Deleting all post history is quite a big deal in terms of SEO, one of the few ways people sharing their work on reddit could potentially benefit from it long term.
In the end the mod also reported him for harassment, which usually entails a 3 day Reddit-wide ban for the user, something that happened to me as well. Similar to my actions to appealing the ban, Hayden was unfortunately not as lucky as the Reddit admin sided with the moderator - i.e. they agreed that the direct messages above constituted "harassment".
Hayden turned to Twitter and the tweet rightfully blew up: https://x.com/haydclay/status/1992979978401857658
This caused a lot of people on Reddit to start posting in the subreddit, protesting the ban and causing moderators to have to work overtime to start banning and muting people. I guess at some point it became too much and they decided to... quit?
After some time, Reddit decided to re-instate the subreddit with 20 new moderators. They also promised to look over the history of bans and see if they were justified or if the team of previous moderators, with potential affiliations to admins, had overstepped their boundaries on more occasions.
Turns out, they had, A LOT:
Okay, so without making this too much about Hive, I wanted to point out a few differences between this part of Reddit and Hive communities.
When post/author mutes happen here, they're stored publicly on the blockchain, so other readers can see when these mutes occur and usual conversations between moderator and author happen publicly. This gives others the option to look over what made the decision of a mute take place to ensure it wasn't a moderator overstepping their role. This also gives people a track history of certain moderators past mutes to see if there's a history of "bad decisions". Lastly, communities on Hive are just numbers, meaning there can be 100 "Art" communities called Art, it's about the subscriber count and activity, so if some moderators are misbehaving, artists can choose to stop sharing in that community and make another one the popular one.
Anyway, I'm glad this occurred, powertrippy moderators are not uncommon on Reddit unfortunately. I know artists like @hiddenblade who've been close to receiving bans on /r/art for sharing their work there cause of the moderators which has lead to countless artists deciding not to share their work there. While I do believe that it's good they added new moderators, these are problems that are not going to go away since the problem is the at the root of it. Unpaid moderators who usually aren't appreciated and almost at no point gain anything from a subreddit/community growing along with their well done work.
Power is the only thing left for them to get anything out of.
It's probably a much bigger issue than I can put into words here, but don't wanna make the post too long. Instead, I'd like to showcase some of Hayden's work with his permission to write this post and give this hero some credit for making a big change for the better for artists on one of the biggest art-related communites on the internet.
Let's start with the one that started this whole banning frenzy:
Clear Boundaries VIII
https://haydenclay.shop/products/clear-boundaries-viii
I'll add some of my favorites I found on his website
H.O.A.
Clear Boundaries
Nosy Neighbor
Which seems to have a great title, given how someone had straight up copied without giving him any credit or mention 🙄
There's a lot of great ones under the suburbs section, along with videos that I can't share here so I recommend checking them out:
https://www.haydenclay.com/suburbs
Here's also his Twitter account, make sure to give him a follow!
I'll be liquidating the rewards from this post and sending Hayden all of them, so give him some love with your upvotes, maybe I'll mange to convince him to check out Hive and share his work here as well! :D