The r/KotakuInAction takeover: a head moderator nukes the sub, admins restore it (2018)

On 13 July 2018 the founder and head moderator of r/KotakuInAction — a large subreddit at the center of the GamerGate controversy, with well over 100,000 subscribers — abruptly used his top position to set the community to private and remove the other moderators. The account, david-me, said he had 'pulled the plug' because the subreddit had, in his view, become 'infested with racism, sexism, and other -isms'. In practice the move meant a single person with seniority had unilaterally shut down a community that thousands of people used.

The takeover lasted only briefly. According to contemporaneous accounts, the subreddit was inaccessible for roughly 45 to 50 minutes before a Reddit administrator, working with the remaining KiA moderators, restored the community and its moderator team and undid david-me's changes. The episode is a clear example of Reddit's administrators directly overriding a top moderator's exercise of power — intervening to reverse an action that the platform's own permission hierarchy technically allowed the head mod to take.

The conflict did not end with the restoration. Around 19 July, david-me publicly floated plans to repurpose KotakuInAction — shifting it from a gaming-focused community to a broader media subreddit and changing its moderation team. After days of further turmoil and anger within the community, Reddit administrators stepped in again on 25 July and removed david-me's moderator powers entirely, ending his control of the subreddit he had created.

The case illustrates a recurring structural problem on Reddit: the platform's permission system gives the longest-tenured moderator near-absolute authority over a community, including the ability to demote others and to shutter or transform the subreddit at will. Ordinarily Reddit treats that authority as sacrosanct under its hands-off moderation philosophy. The KiA intervention showed that the company will, in practice, override the hierarchy when a top moderator tries to destroy or hijack a sizable community — but only after the fact, and at its own discretion.

Commentary at the time was divided. Some argued the creator was entitled to dispose of a community he had built and had founded; others, including Vice, argued that whatever KiA's faults, unilaterally nuking a forum thousands of people relied on was an abuse of moderator power rather than a principled act. Either way, the episode became a frequently cited example of both hostile subreddit takeovers and the limits of Reddit's deference to moderator autonomy.