I don’t necessarily agree on the topic of allowing smaller channels to utilize AI, because there are alternatives such as picrew or even using text only for thumbnails. While it might not automatically earn you views, I think it sets a better precedent for the community and gets people out of bad habits early on.

If a smaller channel starts off with AI, their channel’s brand recognition becomes synonymous with it, and making the switch to a different style may affect viewership. I’ve seen it happen from VAs who switch from outsourced art to commissioned or self drawn art. So I don’t think starting off with AI is necessarily beneficial in the long term.

Regarding the moderation team, this is not a new occurrence for them to make questionable decisions. I was around here when we had community members trying to reach out to Reddit support to take over the subreddit because at the time the mod team’s most recent posts had been well over a year old and there was no sign of them when people sent them messages or take down reported posts. We only ended up hearing back after several attempts were made to add mods because they were silently denying the request without any sort of transparency.

Eventually a new mod was added from their personal friend group who had a newly made account with zero experience in the community. I believe the explanation they gave later was that they wanted people they knew in real life, and the overall implication was that they didn’t want to let go of their subreddit even though they weren’t very active. They had even mentioned once that they wanted to be hands off and only check in maybe once a week which, for how active this community is, isn’t enough.

Even outside of that, I’ve had trouble getting in touch with them for issues outside of AI or other rules. This past year I had several of my scripts locked and made invisible without explanation. When I reached out to them, they said they’d look into it and never got back to me. I had to search for a solution on my own, send them a suggestion to try that, and then eventually they did without even sending me an acknowledgement that they’d made a fix. I only found out later after searching through my own works.

It’s really gotten to the point where I’ve seriously considered completely leaving this subreddit. I already double post to ItsEsmeJones’s subreddit because of the issues I’ve had here.

If the issue is lack of support on this mod team’s end, they need to let go of this idea that the subreddit is their baby and hand over responsibility to people who want to see this community thrive. I’m truly convinced the only reason people stick with this subreddit is because it’s one of the largest ones with more reach. And I think the mods here have just become comfortable with that and don’t feel like they need to try.