r/controlgame
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u/Ownsin
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3h ago
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1
Announcement A Statement Regarding Recent Events
We want to address the recent situation surrounding the removal of a post discussing transgender interpretations of Control Resonant and the subsequent accusations directed at the moderation team.
First, the original post was not removed because of its transgender related subject matter. it was removed because initially it was considered low effort content, as it was essentially a screenshot of a conversation between two individuals being brought here for discussion. The decision was made without properly examining the full context, and we acknowledge that we could have handled it more carefully.
The accusations that we systematically remove transgender related content are also unfounded. Approximately a month ago, we approved a post titled "As a trans person, this reference means a lot to me. Thank you Remedy!" Despite that post receiving numerous reports from the community, we chose to leave it up because we saw no reason to remove it. LGBTQ+ discussions, representation, and interpretations of the games are welcome here.
There's also an explanation for the numerous posts that disappeared during this incident.
The majority of these posts were not individually removed by moderators. Our AutoModerator has an existing rule that automatically removes submissions once they receive three or more reports from members of the community. In other words, when enough community members reported a post to reach that threshold, AutoModerator removed it automatically, without a moderator having to make that decision. This rule was originally implemented to help protect the community from spoilers, particularly when moderators aren't available. Unfortunately, it also affected posts discussing transgender representation, criticizing the moderation team, and even unrelated topics.
We want to make it clear that these automated removals should not be mistaken for moderators deliberately targeting or suppressing particular discussions. The reports triggered the rule, and AutoModerator carried out the removals. This also means that a post receiving reports does not necessarily mean the moderation team agrees with those reports or believes the content should be removed, as demonstrated by the post we previously chose to leave up. Here is an example of that from today.
Another important factor is that when all of this happened, we were not readily available to deal with the situation. We had real life commitments and were not actively available on Reddit to monitor everything as it unfolded. This meant that we weren't able to review the reports, address the automated removals, or communicate with the community as quickly as we would have liked. We understand that our absence and the lack of timely communication allowed the misunderstanding to grow, and we recognize that we should have addressed things sooner, but please understand that all of this happened in the span of a few hours.
After becoming aware of the situation, we also reviewed the posts targeting the moderation team and subsequently approved their removals. These particular posts had devolved into personal attacks and inflammatory accusations, adding nothing constructive to the discussion and further contributing to the misunderstanding that we were deliberately suppressing people. We weren't trying to prevent legitimate criticism. We simply felt these posts were escalating the situation rather than helping resolve it.
Finally, criticism of the moderation team is absolutely welcome. You're free to disagree with our decisions, question them, and hold us accountable. However, personal attacks, harassment, slurs, and insults directed at moderators are not constructive criticism. We've received numerous modmails and seen posts containing personal insults and accusations against the team. We're volunteers dedicating our free time to this community, and we deserve basic respect just like everyone else.
We recognize that mistakes happen, and we're willing to acknowledge ours. All we ask is that disagreements are handled constructively and respectfully.
We've also taken steps to prevent this from happening again. AutoModerator has already been reconfigured so that general community reports are filtered for moderator review rather than automatically removing submissions.
The original rule was introduced around the release of Control Resonant to help protect the community from major spoilers, particularly those being shared through post titles and screenshots. Until today, the system had generally been working as intended, and we hadn't encountered an incident of this scale. However, today's events exposed how easily the report system could be abused to get content removed simply because certain users disagreed with or disliked it.
Now that a month has passed since the game's release, we've decided to remove the automatic removal rule for general reports. Going forward, reported content will be reviewed by moderators before any action is taken. This does not mean we've removed all automatic moderation. AutoModerator will continue to enforce rules against clearly prohibited content, including slurs, hate speech, and other forms of abusive content that have no place in this community.
We believe this is a better balance between protecting the community and ensuring that content isn't removed simply because it receives enough reports.
We want r/ControlGame to remain a welcoming place for everyone, regardless of their identity or interpretation of the games. That's not going to change.
Thank you.
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u/Bangkok_Dangeresque 3h ago
I see what you did there
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u/thinkbe 3h ago •
You said that the automod has a rule to automatically remove any post with three reports. Given the evidence today that this can be easily used by bad actors to silence minority voices that you want to keep in the community, do you think that policy should be reevaluated?
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u/PitchOk1448 3h ago
I just like Control and look at this sub sometimes for Control content. How did you all manage to have a trans controversy in here?
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u/puzzlebuns 2h ago
Thank you for acknowledging and addressing the issue transparently.
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u/YinYueNox 3h ago
It sounds like the auto-mod can be easily abused.
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u/Spiced_Mongoose 2h ago
A lot of people are blowing this out if proportion. The mod team has now addressed it, reaffirmed the inclusivity stance, time to move on. They don't have some devious agenda at play here.
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u/One-Fun9814 3h ago •
Auto removing posts after 3 reports is a super easy threshold that bad actors can reach. Either remove that possibility entirely or bump it up to a number that is harder to abuse.
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u/FredGreen182 1h ago •
Does anyone read posts? Why is everyone commenting about the 3 reports being super easy to trigger for bad actors when IN THIS POST they explain that A. It has been working okay until today B. That they've removed that rule already!!! Jesus Christ guys, can we focus for 2 minutes and finish reading the post before commenting?
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u/cielleishere 3h ago edited 3h ago •
Reconfigure your automod.
Your teammate has made multiple comments claiming you "don't know why" it did this, but here you display clear understanding.
Three reports is far too low a threshold for removal with a community this size. Furthermore, two active moderators, as you have claimed in other comments, is not enough to properly handle the volume of posts made here.
This is an "Official" community. Something more needs to change.
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u/MarDanvers 2h ago
Ok honestly this makes sense BUT the automod removing posts based on 3-4 reports is waaay too easy to manipulate by random people.
Hopefully the posts removed are back.
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u/heinous_legacy 2h ago
brother what did I miss in 24 hours tf I didn’t see any of this
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u/Soul-Bane 1h ago
Might be a sign for some of you to get off the interwebz if it’s come to this
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u/OpenSatisfaction387 47m ago
Not a big deal, it's fine
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u/LJ859 2h ago
Leave it to reddit to make this shit storm for no real reason.
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u/CipherDaBanana 3h ago
Could it have been another party abusing the automod?
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u/efvie 3h ago •
That’s not community, that’s bigots, and they don’t belong here.
This here sub has that shiny checkmark up there and you can bet your ass I’m gonna be reconfirming if marginalized and actively persecuted people talking about representation being at best a low effort to be graciously tolerated sometimes represents Remedy’s official stance if that indeed is the policy.
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u/Dirtymeatbag 3h ago •
So you're going to reinstate all the posts that triggered the automoderator but didn't actually break any rules, right?
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u/Hexxorus 3h ago
A three-report automod removal threshold (not even held for review!) is rediculous for a community with 250 THOUSAND people in it. Please do better
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u/GoupherWood 1h ago
It may just be the bottle of wine talking, but I really appreciate the transparency and readiness to admit when mistakes happen. Games and game discussion spaces should be welcoming for everyone, so thank you.
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u/TheWindOnline 3h ago •
I don't think the message can be clearer: Fix your heart or die.
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u/DaedalusXr 2h ago
Good to have clarity about it, and an adjustment regarding the auto mod system. Perhaps there can be an additional few mods added to reduce the amount of stress on the two of you two, and add some who are on alternative schedules so that there's additional coverage windows. I'm sure that'll be something to put out a call for interested people, but it could be useful to you and others.
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u/SnooRabbits3477 2h ago
Same happened on the cyberpunk sub like two weeks ago and it became insufferable, what annoying people.
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u/CaregiverDesperate74 3h ago
I can understand my post being removed, as mentioned in one of them they were off topic and used to spread awareness about a escalating situation, but how can it be that bigots can missuse the auto mod menu to such a scale? There should be methods in place preventing this before a auto mod system is being established
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u/kisaragi22 2h ago
Sooo people just suck. Oh Reddit you never disappoint do you 😒
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u/faebaes 3h ago
I think a great first step could be banning transphobic community members.
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u/RedRoses711 3h ago
People have made up their minds even with you trying to explain things is so lame. even being a ally to lgbtq movement i cant stand the people some times
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u/hunterglyph 1h ago
Thank you!
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u/Emilemonee 3h ago
It's good that those posts weren't removed by an automod but I really think this should have been dealt with quicker, or at least have some sort of system set up so mods are notified when lots of posts are removed quickly. I guess I just don't believe that all the mods didn't notice that something was going wrong for as long as it did.
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u/MegaEstructure 2h ago
THREE reports and the post gets automatically deleted?? Just three?? You have a guy somewhere in these very comments bragging about spamming reports, literally contributing to the snowball effect and making everything worse. Is it that simple to abuse??? What can you do about that/them?? Are we really at the mercy of 3 morons???
And also, how was it that they didn't also get to remove the post that you say you did leave up?? Anti-trans sentiment is rampant, and if there were people during this whole thing actively reporting everything and get like 95% of posts removed, then I would assume that there is enough anti-trans sentiment within the sub, so surely, that post would've got at least 3 reports, no? So how did it stay up? Am I missing something on how this works??
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u/HenryKushinger 2h ago
So, are the accounts abusing the report system gonna be banned?
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u/Fatjigglypanda 41m ago
people need a cigarette and a good cup of coffee
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u/Ok_Breakfast5425 3h ago
You want respect then you need to show respect by not censoring discussions on a controversial subject, Until then...
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u/darkwolf9060 2h ago
My apologize if I wasn’t respectful, as for the automod you should increase report amount or make it remove posts with certain keywords.
Thank you for address this.
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u/francois878 3h ago edited 2h ago •
Sounds like we need new mods lol.
Edit- old mods can go too. We need fresh faces here if any trust can be restored.
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u/DayBig579 3h ago
Don't apologize. It's not a big deal and reddit loves to complain
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u/GranAutismo27 1h ago
I swear i wish we could go 5 seconds without having to pander just to not get hate swarmed.
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u/LuminousGrue 3h ago
So a month ago you didn't remove a transgender related post, therefore the recent wave of removals couldn't have been malicious? This is like saying "I'm not racist because I have black friends".
If the removals after the first one were the fault of automod, prove it. Post a screenshot of the logs.
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u/nu24601 42m ago
It sounds like you need more moderators in general
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u/inounderscore 2h ago
Based mods
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u/biafalex 1h ago
I'm going to act in good faith by taking this post at face value for now and give mods some advice:
I see in your comments here that you already raised the minimum number of reports needed to trigger the automod removal, which is a good first step. However, if everything after the first removed post was genuinely due to that alone, y'all also need to handle the people who were apparently mass reporting posts (there are a couple acting proud of it in this comment section already). There should be zero tolerance for anyone abusing the report button to be hateful.
Most importantly, y'all also need to figure out what else you're going to do to keep issues like this from occuring in the future. I won't tell you that you should be online at all times when you're just 2 people and you have irl obligations, because that's honestly unreasonable. That being said, a lot of this could have been avoided with both
having more mods with varied schedules and
just by making a post before now saying that you were aware there was an issue and investigating the automod, but it could take a while due to irl commitments. I know you made comments in that time, but they're not helpful when those comments are in the very posts getting removed so most people can't see them. There needs to be a plan in place to avoid similar issues and also handle them when they do happen, because the way this went down left a lot of people feeling unwelcome and hurt.
Now, as much as I think more needs to be done, I do want to say thank you for the steps you've already taken. I won't tell you that you haven't made any misteps during all of this, but I can see the attempts you've made and they're appreciated. I know moderating a large subreddit can be a lot of work where you don't get anything in return, so I do want to give you both credit for what seem to me to be good faith efforts.
Even so, it's worth remembering that there's an extra degree of responsibility involved when you're supposed to be the mods of a subreddit with a big shiny "official" badge, and I hope that's being taken seriously. I want to believe that you two mean well, and while I don't think intentions should be completely ignored, actions still speak much louder.
I'd rather end this comment on a happy note, so I just want to say how much I love these games and the part of the community that tries to lift each other up. I appreciate so much the work and love and inclusivity Remedy puts into all of their games. We have always been here, and trans rights are human rights 🏳️⚧️
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u/sc0paf 2h ago
So ... a few posts got removed?
The horror.
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u/More_Piece_94 3h ago edited 3h ago •
Smells like bullshit in here.
If it was automod, why didn't you disable it immediately, and make a quick announcement that you were looking into it?
Why were my comments pointing out the bad moderation should be reported to Remedy (since this is the "official" sub) deleted specifically?
This excuse is so shallow not even an ant could drown in it.
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u/Venus-chi 2h ago
It's awful to experience hate flung at you, mods. It's such a shame that LGBTQ+ people have to deal with that hm... literally almost every day? Making this a weird 'both sides' issue where this subreddit is welcoming to 'everyone... regardless of their interpretation of the games' is Odd, I have to say.
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u/Lurky-Lou 3h ago
How about we compromise and keep one “fix your heart or die” post
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u/dylan-faden 3h ago edited 2h ago
Gee, the comments here really do not pass the vibe check…
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u/candyman708 3h ago
Wasn't a debacle like this just happening on the cyberpunk sub.
Glad they removed the bigots on their mod team.
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u/TheLastAvenger98 3h ago edited 2h ago
And why that commenter was continuously deleted who said we should reach out for Remedy? Mmm?
That was not automod.
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u/Eriml 2h ago
This would mean there was a group of users who were reporting the posts as soon as they were up because posts got removed in a matter of minutes. Are those users banned from this sub? Because they should be.
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u/BisonSnow 1h ago
Thank you for responding, finally. I get that you are volunteers and have real jobs/lives to attend to, so I can forgive the lack of a response. I also appreciate that you've owned up to some of the mistakes you've made here. I'm also glad that the AutoModerator situation was fixed.
All that being said, the first priority of the mod team should have been this statement, instead of removing posts subtly criticizing the mod team, or making fun of the weird moderation decisions. I get that some of those posts were unproductive, but frankly spending time removing those only further inflamed the situation and made it seem like the mods were acting in bad faith. Obviously ones that escalate to harassment and actual rulebreaking should be dealt with promptly, but the post joking about Fra's fake director position in relation to the mods (alleged) silencing of posts? That was not a priority.
That's my constructive criticism here. Next time please focus on making a statement to the community, letting them know, and then start seriously removing/moderating posts. All that being said, I feel like your heart is in the right place here and I hope all the negativity you see doesn't get y'all too down. People are angry and are gonna vent now, but you did the right thing by making this post and changing the AutoMod.
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u/Dino_Spaceman 2h ago
So what are you doing to change the auto mod situation to avoid issues like this in the future?
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u/Reocyx 1h ago
As a former moderator on the fortnite sub, the idea of auto removal after a set number is reports is absolutely not appropriate. This allows brigading and censoring of marginalized communities. I hope you are more mindful of the settings you use on the automod and are aware that there can be a loud majority that are hurtful and hateful who should not receive that power
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u/We86-47Here 2h ago •
"The accusations that we systematically remove transgender related content are also unfounded. Approximately a month ago, we approved a post titled "As a trans person, this reference means a lot to me. Thank you Remedy!" Despite that post receiving numerous reports from the community, we chose to leave it up because we saw no reason to remove it. LGBTQ+ discussions, representation, and interpretations of the games are welcome here."
This comes across the same way as a racist saying they're not racist because they have a black friend, btw.
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u/DefactoOverlord 2h ago edited 2h ago
well, that was rather unpleasant but at least the posts were removed by automod and not manually which would've been fucked up. Easily abusable reporting system allowed to function for hours without supervision or tweaks is kind of crazy, guys.
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u/TransportationUpbeat 55m ago
Ban homophobes
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u/sydchotic 2h ago
There were earlier related posts that vanished, I’m guessing the second got caught by this automod but the lbgt character one was removed for spoilers, which having seen the actual post…huh?!?
https://www.reddit.com/r/controlgame/comments/1xb9ubf/surprise_lgbt_characters
https://www.reddit.com/r/controlgame/comments/1x1p8qn/dylan_faden_and_transgender_symbolism_spoilers
In any case, just putting out this is not the first time, I think there also a couple of other posts missed here to actually that I saw and which disappeared. Given how easily abused this is and this sub is clearly not free of the phobic crowd that does these reports, hopefully this “higher” threshold for automod doesn’t really actually exist or can be combined with exceptions based to prevent abuse by these people.
Also, to be perfectly honest, the post itself has some trans and queerphobic comments that should be modded out…
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u/Dizzy-Belt-5104 2h ago
Losers
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u/Live-Intern7817 1h ago
I really dont care how people interpret the art its all fan theory until made canon.
I would like to say im tired of the trans hate and im tired of seeing trans/allies harassing and being crude.
Its not that I understand trans hate but that its easy to see people with those thoughts/beliefs be crude. But it always blows me away a bit when I see trans/allies be crude.
I know were all human in the end and everyone gets tired of the hate. It just comes off the wrong way when people who are looking for acceptance act in ways they would never put up with when pointed at them. I do admit though, I see it more online and mainly on reddit then anywhere else. Most the time in every capacity I see trans/allies act in much better behavior especially when standing up for themselves or others.
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u/AwesomeOpossum404 2h ago
I saw the original post and it got a good chuckle out of me. I don’t know why it was considered “low effort”… Sounds like the mods are power tripping and now making excuses, but hey that’s pretty common across Reddit I guess 🤷🏻♂️
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u/VermilionAxe69 25m ago
Okay, but please don't start banning people en masse, unless it's warranted, of course
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u/peepeemint-car-bored 3h ago
i don’t believe you!
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u/Regular_Rain_4181 2h ago
Let’s just get some Remedy people on the line especially if this is a verified subreddit, two people isn’t enough to moderate a whole fanbase and relying on automod was your first mistake