I guess I've gotta do a thing on the reddit fiasco

If you do not care about the ordeal with the Pistons subreddit then good for you, you are far better adjusted in your life. Ignore this and continue with your day. Other than perhaps the occasional sarcastic snipe this is the last of this nonsense that will be appearing here.

I didn’t have much interest in doing this but given that “the mod in question” has continued to delete my comments and lock threads I was unable to say my piece where it is supposed to be said so I have to do it here because Nerouin (the mod in question) can’t delete or lock this post. This will probably ramble some but I’ll try to address the needed points as tightly as possible.

And I want to be clear. This is exceptionally stupid, if you think this is stupid you are right. If you ignore this you are right to do so. But here’s the deal. I don’t much like being called a liar. So here we are. The fact that I know this is going to be long is also the whole reason I was hoping to not be required to do this because I can’t help myself but put full effort into it but whatever. Here we go.

What if I’m not on Reddit so idk what’s going on but I also love petty internet drama?

Well, you’re in the right place I guess.

Quick run-down for those unaware.

I’m Joetruck. I’ve posted original content to the Pistons subreddit for like 7ish years. Primarily in the form of previews and recaps of each game. Those posts would look like this:

The full text is on reddit, with a link at the top so that if people want to read on my personal site, they can.

As you can also see there, that post is from 7 years ago. Been a long time we’ve been at this. This is what those posts look like now.

As you can see. Not much has changed.

A little less than a month ago I get this message:

One important thing here is that they cited a contravention of the subreddit policy on merchandising. When we later get to the mods attempt to explain themselves it’s important to remember this. Many thoughts are tossed around about concerns with spam, power users, or whatever. They never said any of that to me. They cited “merchandising” which is conveniently listed as subreddit rule #9:

Once again, they did not even bring up issues with self-promotion or over-promoting or anything but here is rule #3 which is self promotion.

Given that I wouldn’t be shocked at this point if they edited things to make it seem like I’m lying, here’s a bigger screen-grab to prove those rules are current and accurate for the subreddit.

Did you downvote their explanation? Really?

I never said I wasn’t petty.

Anyways. There was some back and forth about this. I pointed out the absurdity of equating me having a paid subscription option to someone trying to sell shirts or some memorabilia or whatever. I pointed out that by putting the full text on reddit I was willingly torpedoing traffic to my substack just cause I find the interactions to be better. I pointed out that I had been linking to a substack in exactly this way since the start of last season, and each time I received a “you’re marketing a product that is not allowed.”

At the end I offered to remove anything on the substack that suggests a paid option, from the widget that you can see somewhere in this post, to editing my link to simply say “read on my substack if you like” so that nowhere in my writing or the direct link says anything about subscriptions, free or otherwise. This was met with no response. And it sat like that for like two weeks. You can see that they didn’t respond here.

This brings us up to the point that I actually want to make sure is clear because this is where accusations of me misrepresenting and lying about things arrives.

As you can see, they were prompted to stop ignoring me to accuse me of “advancing false versions of events”

Over those two weeks I didn’t make an angry rant on the subreddit or go out of my way to call the mods shit-heads or have some sort of a breakdown. My only comment was this on my Marvin Bagley Season Preview

You Gonna Talk about the reddit situation?

Not right now. It’s exceptionally stupid, equating this substack having a paid subscriber option to someone trying to sell t-shirts on the subreddit (I can’t link to the substack since I am “marketing a product” is the literal language used by the mods) meaning that ad-supported content is fine but if the ad is for yourself then it’s not? Regardless, it mostly makes me sad, because I like to shoot the shit with the reddit folk. But for now the mods can answer people when it’s questioned why I stopped posting stuff because they decided to have some weird, petty, powertrip.

I won’t bother to screen-grab that since the mods cannot attempt to alter it somehow.

And so it sat. I abided by their ruling and did not post anything with a link to my substack in the subreddit. As a result, I simply didn’t post there. Had no one brought it up further it would’ve faded out of view other than an occasional bit of moaning by me in this space.

Then this post comes up on the subreddit.

Many thoughts were had, some kind folk shared the above quote I made about the situation. The thread was well underway by the time I saw it so I responded to someone and laid out my view.

I ain’t reading that.

TL;DR: they won’t let me link my substack. This is dumb for several reasons, also “the mod in question” has a podcast that has a banner for gambling which would suggest that if I replaced my subscribe button with a gambling advert, featuring my own promo code, that would be preferrable.

That last bit is what, in the official stance of “the moderator in question”, is what put me in hot water. That comment was promptly removed (when a mod removes your comment on reddit you can still see it but no one else can. So that unless someone else says something or you have a burner you don’t even know its been removed) and I received the message about advancing false versions of events. Here’s that whole exchange.

This will be brought up several more times and stated that no there is no gambling ad and no there is no promo and that I’m a dirty stupid liar.

So lets address the main thing here. Suggestions that there are no gambling ads or “main page” or whatever that is apparently “provably false”

This is podcast of “The Mod in question”

It is part of hoops pod net. Here is Hoops Podcast Network twitter where you can see the promo code right there.

And here is the main page of the network, conveniently featuring the podcast belonging to “the mod in question” right there. All underneath a giant banner stating that these podcasts are brought to you by draft kings and to use their code.

The idea that “the mod in question” was unaware of this is especially straining given that the description of his pods features the big disclaimer you need to have when you advertise gambling.

His podcasts have featured that disclaimer in the description for each pod since this one back in march

Ironically, the podcast he just put up yesterday does not feature this disclaimer. Further straining belief that he was unaware that his own podcast was a ripe option for highlighting the foolishness of the decision.

What if he never did the ad-reads himself?

Doesn’t matter. Once again, I was told even if I remove any reference to subscribing from my actual link on reddit or the post on my substack, the fact you can click a couple of times to navigate where it is would be unacceptable.

Nerouin said he stopped posting the pod to the subreddit for this reason to avoid accusations of bias.

Yep he said that right here.

He has in fact not posted a podcast to the subreddit since they told me to not link to a substack, with his last one being about a week before they told me off.

This, however, doesn’t gel with what they told me in the mod-mail. One of my main complaints was that I had been linking to the substack for almost a year so why is it not alright now. Their response was basically that they had been busy and hadn’t seen it.

My posts were “sporadic and during periods of high activity.” So basically, I spent a whole season posting stuff this way that was against the rules but they just didn’t realize it. So either whichever mod this is here (let’s play 1 guesses) is lying and they made this rule change just before telling me off, or the mod in question is lying about stopping posting his pod out of some desire to not appear biased instead of that he just hadn’t posted the other pods for whatever reason. (he did not ever post all of them)

Regardless. Even if we give the benefit of the doubt on the other stuff. His contention was that there were no gambling ads or promos which is absolutely untrue. MOST IMPORTANTLY: He’s made clear that he’s totally within his rights to post the podcast if he wanted to.

So for all his preening and pruning the point still stands.

Yes. The mod in question unintentionally stated, without question, that I could replace my substack subscription with a gambling promo code and I would be clear and free. Having a promo-code that gives you direct commission is acceptable. What effectively amounts to a donation option is not.

Before we move on, also worth noting that after deleting my comment the mods took my advice and made their own comment in that thread.

Worth pointing out here that the only false thing said in this fiasco at this point is that last bit suggesting that my personal blog was ad-supported, because it wasn’t. There were ads initially and the mods then asked me to not have them so I got rid of them. Obviously, when I wrote stuff for other sites there were ads there. Not only was my personal blog not ad-supported (outside of doing a gift-card giveaway to Green-Dot-Stables one time) it cost me like $30 per month to have.

Ok. Onto the more recent timeline. Some other mods stepped in and it briefly seemed as though perhaps this had been a miserable misunderstanding.

I won’t share the one cause the mod said who it was and I don’t want to bring extra ire there. But he then said “And actually I’m a bit confused you’ve been posting these for a while with just the link in the description and then had the link there. I’m terribly confused by what the beef is about.” (and once again, if the mod team says that isn’t what said then I’ve got the screenshot, just don’t want anyone undeserving to catch problems)

So I responded with this and then you can see that a new thread is started so this is the end of the correspondence. As of this writing they still have not responded to this in the modmail.

From here I was told via dm from one mod that I was good to post. Once again don’t want to draw attention to any specific mod but if they call BS I once again have the receipts.

So the next day I posted my next post as I always had. With a link to my subreddit. Also led that post by saying

“You may be able to tell if you are reading this on reddit. But the situation appears to be resolved. Please do not continue to give the mods crap about it or whatever and put the whole episode behind us. A massive thank you to all the folk who supported me on it that was very cool.”

Later that day, notifications stopped coming in from the Reddit post so I had my suspicions and confirmed it had been removed. Then the twitter goup chat shared this beauty of a post with me.

And this post is the reason why I’m here. It is here that the above comment was made saying that I was spreading “provably false” things with regards to “the mod in question” podcast but we’ve covered that. If you want to see someone get downvoted into oblivion you can go ahead and view that link.

You said this post is the reason you are ultimately doing this

Yeah. So once again, they didn’t tell me that they removed my post in the morning, and they didn’t tell me they were putting up this post. Rather than talk about this like an adult they decided to simply ignore me, remove my content, and try to have some sort of open-floor session without saying anything to me about how “hey this is the place to plead your case” or “We will see what people say about this” or anything else. Making the whole idea that this post is some attempt at transparency exceptionally hollow, since they were utterly opaque to me, the one who this was actually all about.

So anyways, I become away of it, after a bit I’m on a break at work and decide to delve in. By this point the thread is in full swing and “the mod in question” is getting downvoted into the nether.

I, seeing that this is apparently the open floor for discussion, decided that this was the place I could air my issues so I hopped in and started replying to people in the thread. Most of those responses you can still see in the link but they all contain no info that is not already here.

One of my comments was this:

Once again, nothing in that hasn’t already been said here. Those links go to the pictures of his podcast and host network that I put here.

Shortly after I made that comment, Nerouin responded to it with this:

We will touch on that in a moment but then came the action that caused me to not worry about making waves or making the moderators lives difficult. “The mod in question” pulled just about the ultimate bitch move. After responding to me, he deleted my comment and then locked the thread. And when I say he did this right after responding to me, I saw his comment, immediately typed a response and the thread was locked before I’d even finished it.

Then “the mod in question” pretended that he was ready to wrap it up anyways and acted as though this was just a great chat.

So to simplify that.

1. Make thread that is open-floor to talk through what to do about me without doing anything to let me know that its happening.

2. Get told by everyone you’ve bottled this.

3. I arrive to make my case, in the thread where the whole point is for people to make their case.

4. Respond to one of my comments, delete it, and then lock the thread before I can respond.

So yeah. Congratulations to Nerouin and the other mods who apparently let him run amok. My intention was to leave all my bitching in that thread where it belonged but you literally acted as deceptively as you possibly could’ve, short of deleting the thread entirely, in order to keep me from making my case. So now I’ve got a however many words post full of receipts to make my case, since apparently, you have no interest in letting me do it in the thread you made specifically to do this.

Lastly here, a ton of the talk in that thread focused on people perhaps posting too much. As I showed earlier, that was never brought up to me. If the discussion had been “Hey we know you’ve done this a long time but if you could not post every other day that’d be great we don’t want to set that as a standard for other people”

I’d still be pretty frustrated with that given that when the season starts I do two posts every game-day. But even if that is foolish reasoning (we are worried this will be abused by people in the future so we will punish you for it right now to get ahead of it) but there is a base reasoning that makes at least some sense. But they didn’t bring that up. Suggesting that me posting too much had anything to do with this is a retcon attempting to make people think you were not as far off base as you are. If I were a less generous person I would even suggest that it is outright deception.

Why do you care enough about this to write this?

A big part of this is that I’m upset I was blocked from making my case. The sneaky, purposefully manipulative way I was blocked today was the last straw. They made it clear they won’t communicate with me, and they won’t let me communicate.

There is a bigger picture here. And that bigger picture is a direct response and critique of this:

So the basic argument here is that you are allowed to make some money but if you find a more efficient way to earn some money for your work that’s not acceptable? Why on earth would we approach it this way? I’ve never asked for special treatment and have in fact rejected it on many occasions. My line remains that I’m just an asshole on the internet with bad opinions just like the rest of you. And this is the point.

Them cutting me off from the best way to write what I want to write and get to engage with the reddit homies like I want while getting some pittance of money out of it results in a riot. But what kids may, in the future, decide to give it a go only to be snuffed out without anyone noticing?

I want more people to do cool shit. And I want people who do cool shit to get some sort of compensation for it. If there were multiple people like me posting good original content in the subreddit, driving conversations, making the discourse smarter and supporting the team more enjoyable I would love that. I’ve told this before but the whole reason I started this is that I felt Pistons coverage was lacking so I’d give it a go.

This also seems to be a situation where reddit’s built-in tools work great. Plenty of people (my mind goes to Duncan Smith when he was head man at Piston Powered. Trying to break into the subreddit only to be chased off in a flurry of downvotes and insults) have tried to infiltrate the subreddit with their content. Most of those people get downvoted and called names so they never come back. If someone was spamming the subreddit with crap no one wants then people can downvote it. If the subreddit gets to a size where there’s too many to realistically keep up with it then maybe we can take some further action. But that is certainly not the case now.

So my question is, why on earth would we set up a rule that does nothing but further push the subreddit away from cool OC? If you make cool Pistons art I want you to post it and put a link to where I could buy a print. If you make a cool podcast I want you to get hooked up with a sportsbook to get in on the gambling money. If you write cool shit I want you to share it with me and tell me how I can support you. The members of Pistons reddit are more than ruthless enough to weed out the fakers and the faint of heart.

Substack’s model is by far the best way to get some sort of compensation. Because you are independent there is no pressure to write the clickbait BS that no one really wants shared on the subreddit anyways, you don’t need to pay to host it, and if you can even get like 10 people who like it enough to pay you it’s enough to take your wife out for dinner as thanks for putting up with you watching so many basketball games.

Why is it so much better?

On a normal ad model you will get around $1 per 1,000 clicks. That means that my current 5 paying subscribers are worth about 25,000 clicks with traditional ads. When you consider that I am not paying $30 to host my own site as well, this is comfortably the best I’ve ever had it while writing. I don’t have the numbers anymore because I stopped paying for my own site but I know for a fact I never, in 6 years of doing it, even crossed 10,000 clicks on my own site.

So yeah. Let people make cool stuff and let them take advantage of tools that allow them to most efficiently get compensation for it. If people are fake, annoying, or blatant used-car salesmen we can take care of that with our handy downvote button and big book of insults. Maybe someday the subreddit may get big enough that more moderation is needed, but it isn’t near that point yet.

So what solution do you want? What’s your endgame here?

As far as reddit goes. I want to make text posts and get called horrible names while calling others horrible names on reddit just like I have for 7 years. While doing that, I want to use the best tool for people to support the work that keeps their mind occupied while on the toilet.

If “the mod in question” cannot allow that. Then whatever. You guys have made clear that you will support me whether I’m posting on Reddit or not and that you will even post my good stuff there for me.

On that note, I’d like to make a genuine thank you to everyone who’s supported me. The 5 of you who are paid subscribers, those of you who are free subscribers, and all of you who spoke out for my case. I’m not the sentimental type, but it’s nice to see that the last 7 years have not been a total waste and there are people who have connected with my work.

The ball is in the moderators’ court now, if they let me back then I’ll be back to posting as normal. Until/unless that happens I’ll be counting on ya’ll to post me into the subreddit.

So yeah. This is the last I’m saying about it. Subscribe here or go paid if you want to support this work. Or don’t. That’s up to you. There’s going to be tons of content and once we get into the season I’ll think of an appropriate perk to have as a thank you to those who went paid. I am open to suggestions there.

To end on a happy note. Here is me next to some of the sunflowers I’ve grown this Summer

Keep your stick on the ice.