Why We No Longer Post Content on Reddit
If you’ve been following D&D Unleashed for a long time, you may remember that we first started releasing our content using Reddit as our main platform. You may also have noticed that we don’t post content on Reddit anymore, with a few rare exceptions (which will no longer be happening). We have received several questions about this, and we would like to explain by laying out the reasons why Reddit is a poor platform for our content and how the structure of reddit has been abused by subreddit moderators and by other D&D homebrew content creators to push us out of the space, in order for it to be monopolized by people who gate their homebrew content behind paywalls such as Patreon. The only option left to us is to tell the world about what has happened. If you are a reddit user and you find these accounts resonate with you, please share this article.
Brigading & Parallel Communities
Reddit is known for being highly vulnerable to coordinated mass manipulation of the upvote and downvote system, often called “brigading” by Reddit users. This behavior is technically against the terms of service for reddit and is punishable by permanently banning the brigading accounts — however, it is well-known that this punishment essentially never happens. In fact, reddit allows entire discord communities to be run adjacent to various subreddits, wherein the discord users regularly work together to use reddit’s algorithm to bury posts that they want to go unseen. They do this by using the tools reddit gives them. They use the follow feature on users who they wish to target, and whenever they are notified of a post from that user, they go into their discord channels (or other parallel forums or chatrooms) and organize a wave of downvotes onto the targeted user’s post. A reddit post that receives many early downvotes will not be showed to the vast majority of users. Similarly, they are able to manipulate their own content in the same way, using their parallel communities to boost their own posts early and ensure (through violating reddit’s rules) that their content is always visible.
You may have noticed that we don’t have any parallel chatrooms or forums here to be used for such a purpose. We don’t believe in doing these things. But many people do, and we have long been made a target of their coordinated vote manipulation. In fact, the coordinated waves of vote manipulation are what prompted us to create this website years ago in the first place, to ensure that we would always have a fair platform on which to post our content. However, we attempted to continue to post our content to reddit in order to maximize the number of people who can see it. We even created a dedicated D&D Unleashed subreddit. Still, without stooping to engage in this vote manipulation, we haven’t been able to outpace the coordinated burials that occur whenever we post D&D homebrew content anywhere on reddit — even in our own dedicated subreddit. Your traffic to this website and all your messages of support show us that what we do is desired, and that we have an audience. But reddit is just not built for an honest audience to be able to overcome coordinated manipulation of its voting systems.
You will find that many of the active homebrew creators for 5th edition D&D do cultivate these parallel communities, and they do so with the express purpose of manipulating social media voting systems such as reddit, imgur, and instagram. You can easily find them by looking at their profiles, and even sometimes in the sidebars of the various D&D subreddits. If you ask them for advice, they will even explain to you how important it is to build a group of users that will do these things, despite the fact that they are admitting to breaking the terms of service on a wide scale. They know, after all, that nothing will be done and no one will be punished. The admins of reddit are known for being hands-off, and they even engage in these behaviors themselves at times. In many ways, brigading is built into the design of reddit, despite being against the rules. We at D&D Unleashed are not content to engage in this kind of dishonest behavior, and so our content is regularly buried, and potential users are denied access to free content so that content locked behind a paywall may be better elevated.
Subreddit Moderators
If you are a reddit user, you may be left wondering where subreddit moderators fall into all of this. After all, the moderators of each subreddit have broad power over all the content and comments that are posted in their subreddit. In theory, they are accountable to only two forces — the admins of reddit (who are notorious for doing little to address moderator issues) and the users of the subreddits that the moderators preside over. However, the users are generally not aware of all the ways that moderators abuse their power, because they have the ability to take down any posts or comments that are critical of them. This means that even when they abuse their power, users are left with little or no recourse available. They are banned from the forum and prevented from speaking with the rest of the moderator team, so that any abuses of power can be kept secret in case the entire mod team isn’t on board with those abuses.
And we have experienced numerous abuses of power at the hands of the moderators of two subreddits: /r/dndnext and /r/unearthedarcana. The moderators of these subreddits have locked our posts, removed our posts, and in one case even banned us from the subreddit. In none of these cases did we break subreddit rules, nor were the moderators able to explain how we had supposedly broken the rules. They simply silenced us. In all of these instances, the moderators not only did not adhere to their own stated rules, but even allowed other users and content creators to exist in a double standard. When those other users and creators (such as “MonkeyDM” and “TheArenaGuy”) did the same things that we did, they were not punished and we were. This has happened repeatedly over many years, showing a clear bias against us. We have been made the target of fabricated screenshots, rules that don’t exist, and “mistakes” that prevent our posts from being seen on a regular basis.
These moderators and creators participate in the same discord communities together. Best as we can tell, the moderators work with certain creators to boost the advertisements for various Patreons and shut down any freely-offered competition. They use their mod tools to silence us and prevent us from speaking out directly to the communities they preside over. Some of them may even be the same people operating multiple accounts, of course. As a result, we have no other choice but to leave in protest and announce the dishonesty to anyone who will listen.
Our Promise — Always Free
In the meantime, we will continue to put out well-balanced and designed homebrew content for D&D 5th edition. No amount of coordinated action from parallel communities will bring down this website or prevent us from giving content to all of you for free. And unlike those who try to stop us, our content will always be free.
Paid third-party content has its place, and we even use some in our personal games here. But we believe that our form of game content — homebrew rules and mechanics — suffers in quality when more must always be constantly created to fulfill a monetary goal . Instead of core themes being expressed in the simplest and broadest ways possible, creators who seek money are encouraged to produce narrow and esoteric content so that they can continue forever. In other words, the pursuit of money inevitably becomes more important than the quality of the product. In addition, we think that being accessible is the most important thing for content that everyone should be able to read and use together at the table.
And so, we long ago decided that D&D Unleashed will never be gated behind a paywall. Not for the pdfs, not for the full versions, not for the Foundry modules or the D&D Beyond links, not for a single ounce of content. It will all be free and available for you to use however you wish, always. That is our promise to you.
- Benevolent Evil
