r/KotakuInAction: The Gamergate Hub and Its 2018 Founder Shutdown
2014–2018
r/KotakuInAction, Reddit's central Gamergate hub, was never permanently banned; in July 2018 its founder briefly privated it calling it 'infested with racism and sexism,' but Reddit admins restored it within about an hour.
What happened
r/KotakuInAction (commonly abbreviated KiA) was created in 2014 and quickly became the central Reddit hub for the Gamergate movement, an online campaign that ostensibly framed itself around 'ethics in games journalism' but became widely associated with coordinated harassment of women and progressive figures in the video-game industry. The community took its name from the gaming-news site Kotaku and grew to roughly 100,000 subscribers, making it one of the most prominent and contentious communities in Reddit's gaming-adjacent ecosystem. Vice characterized it as a space where 'sexism and racism' drove community cohesion and helped movements like Gamergate 'thrive and multiply.' Unlike the other communities in this archive, KiA was never permanently banned by Reddit and remains active.
The community's most dramatic moment came not from Reddit's administrators but from its own founder. On July 12, 2018, the subreddit's creator, the moderator known as u/david-me, abruptly set r/KotakuInAction to private and attempted to effectively shut it down, locking out its nearly 100,000 subscribers. In an accompanying message he described the subreddit as 'one of the many cancerous growths that have infiltrated reddit' and declared it 'infested with racism and sexism.'
The founder's action went beyond simply privating the community. According to Vice's reporting, david-me barred the rest of the moderation team from using their privileges and deleted the subreddit's CSS — the custom styling that included user flair and visual themes — in an apparent effort to make the community difficult to restore.
Reddit's administrators intervened directly, working with the existing moderation team to restore r/KotakuInAction within about an hour, and the company told Vice that david-me's actions were under investigation. The rapid reinstatement meant the community experienced only a brief outage rather than a true shutdown, and control was returned to the standing moderators. No permanent enforcement action against the subreddit resulted.
The episode generated significant commentary about the nature of Gamergate. In a follow-up piece, Vice argued the founder deserved 'no credit' for the deletion attempt, framing it as a belated and self-serving gesture rather than meaningful accountability for a community long criticized for fostering harassment. Critically — and unlike the other communities in this archive — r/KotakuInAction has never been quarantined or permanently banned and continues to operate; this entry documents the Gamergate hub's history and its brief founder-led shutdown rather than a Reddit ban. The harm associated with it is the documented role of Gamergate in sustained harassment, doxxing, and threats against women and minorities in the games industry and press.
Impact
Unlike the other communities profiled, KiA suffered no permanent ban; the only major disruption was a brief, self-inflicted roughly one-hour outage in July 2018 that Reddit administrators promptly reversed. The incident — in which the founder himself called the roughly 100,000-subscriber community 'infested with racism and sexism' — drew wide coverage from Vice and others as a rare case of a community's own creator trying to shut down the Gamergate hub he built, overruled by Reddit. It crystallized the debate over whether the platform should host a community tied to organized harassment.
Sources
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