I've been on reddit for over 10 years. This site used to have a sister site called Digg, and thanks to Digg migration Reddit overnight became one of the most popular sites on the internet because Digg was censoring their posts people came to reddit where the sites open source(and still is!) so if reddit became evil people could jump ship. So the admins have a very very strong hands off policy. In fact there was a subreddit called /r/jailbaot that was really popular for years on reddit. I have never ever seen a post like this

Hi, 2XC. Since this thread's getting a fair amount of attention, I'd just like to take this opportunity to explain a few things around the situation from an admin perspective that I think it's useful for people to keep in mind as this topic continues to come up.

I mostly just want to urge people to not take everything at face value. There are a lot of people that seem quite invested in trying to get the mods to remove this subreddit from the defaults, and unfortunately that means that they're willing to try to cheat, lie, and do various other unsavory things to influence this decision.

For example, the OP of this thread was using at least 5 alternate accounts to attempt to tilt things in here, including upvoting their own submission and supportive comments (and they've now been banned from the site for that). There's generally just a great deal of attempted manipulation going on around the topic of 2XC being a default, between people attempting to manipulate votes, using multiple accounts to post comments supportive of their side, organized groups brigading relevant posts, etc. Some people have even been performing what's often referred to as a "false flag", where even though they're actually normally a contributing member of the subreddit, they've been creating alt accounts to make or upvote harassing comments/messages in order to make that issue seem more prevalent than it actually is.

And on the topic of harassing PMs, one of the most frustrating aspects of the situation from our perspective is that there's been a significant amount of lying on this end. We've received quite a few reports about users who have claimed to have received a large amount of harassment, but when we investigate we find that they've often never received any PMs at all, or only one message when they claim to have received many. Some people have even gone so far as creating alts to PM themselves with, so that they can take screenshots for "proof".

I'm certainly not trying to say that there hasn't been any harassment, because some definitely has actually occurred (and please report it to us by sending a modmail to /r/reddit.com if it happens to you). But between the various outside groups trying quite hard to push 2XC out, the false flags, and the lying, please take all claims about it with a large grain of salt.

Just to be clear though, we'll be perfectly happy with whatever decision the subreddit eventually makes about whether to remain a default or not. We definitely like having it as a default (which is why we asked the mods if we could include it), but if they decide they've changed their mind, that's great as well. I'd just really like to see that the decision is made honestly, instead of as a result of all the manipulation going on around it.