Before I begin, I should warn you that this is going to take around seven minutes to read. I’ve been reluctant to talk about this not only for its length but also because mainstream “lesbian” porn has a reputation for being fake, exploitative, and fetishistic (technically all problems with porn in general, but that’s another story). If you are disappointed or disgusted to learn this about me then I’ll understand, but today I am primarily concerned with talking about my experiences as a Reddit moderator than talking about the porn industry.
You may not believe this, but I was almost famous several years ago when I was running a NSFW account on Reddit. I started out contributing to and later moderating one subcommunity that I liked (r/lesbianasslick), and eventually I was moderating umpteen other subcommunities dedicated to all-women pornography. Some of them included r/BBWLesbians, r/lesbianboobs, r/lesbianmassages, r/lesbianoral, r/Lesbian_gifs, r/ExoticLesbians, r/interraciallesbian, r/lesbianvariations, r/Rule34lesbians, r/yurigif, and others. Nearly all of them flourished under my care, and to make matters even better, I accumulated 6,969 followers by July 2021. I mean, I was starting to become a big deal over there!
At first I enjoyed it: I had fun restyling the subcommunities to make them look gayer, and I loved the idea of maintaining my own little empire dedicated to all-women pornography. It was fun contributing to the subcommunities and seeing what others shared. Sure, it was kind of boring repeatedly deleting duplicate content as well as purging the subcommunities of spam, but for a while I could tolerate that task.
Best of all was the fan mail that I received. Although it happened sporadically, I did get a few direct messages from women praising me for my contributions, and I loved that. Getting fan mail from somebody else once was okay; getting fan mail from women was absolutely delightful. I might have even kept my account if only I had received more fan mail from women.
However, as time went on I was taking more and lengthier breaks than I used to, and when I would return after a week or so of inactivity, there were scores of unreviewed threads that I had to approve; almost no-one ever helped me when I was doing janitorial work. Sometimes subjecting all of these threads to review could take nearly an hour!
At times I had to deal with users who were intentionally disruptive, too. For example, every other week I had to review reports that looked exactly like this:
It's involuntary pornography and i do not appear in it
Mildly amusing… previous to seeing it umpteen thousand times, that is. Seriously, don’t tell the same joke over and over again when you send reports, especially when it wasn’t funny to begin with. It’s fucking annoying. In fact, if I were you I would not send joke reports at all. I am sure that some people do that only to make us laugh, but it can easily just sap our enthusiasm for doing our jobs, and you do not want that.
That was not the worst part, though. Occasionally, somebody would also ‘bite’ me for enforcing the rules, like removing a submission because a dude was in it for a couple of seconds, and I had to suspend somebody who whined about ‘black chicks’, which only made him belligerent.
Click here if you want to read my “favorite” interactions.
November 2018: some fuck who went by the name of u/KoreanStudent123 pushed into one of my threads to say ‘Ew black chicks.’ This is the ban message that I sent him:
I’ve already told you not to do this. Please, I’m begging you, educate yourself on the disproportionate amount of abuse that black women face. Ask yourself: how do you think that they would feel if they were just trying to relax but then they stumbled upon your comment?
If you want to be unbanned, and more importantly if you want to help others, I’ll gladly help you unlearn your prejudice in whatever way I can. Otherwise, you leave us with no choice but to block you.
His reply:
How are you going to help me unlearn not being attracted to black chicks? That's like sending a gay guy to conversion therapy where they try to make him straight. That comment was my way of saying, "I'm not attracted to this race". And I'm not going to worry about how people feel when they see my comment. I'm not responsible for other people's emotions.
Regarding my political beliefs about blacks and Hispanics. All of my beliefs are based on statistical data, personal observations and common sense. Most people on reddit are willfully ignorant of the reality around them. Likely because most of the more vocal users of reddit are middle to upper middle class with no day-to-day interaction with either blacks or hipanics. [sic] Well I encourage you to come hang out on the corner of Somerset and Kensington and see how friendly your favorite black people are to you. And lets [sic] see if they care how "sensitive" they'll be to your feelings when you're just trying to mind your own business and relax.
Go ahead. ban me. I'll start my own lesbian fetish subreddit with even better lesbian ass licking. In fact, I'll start my own porn studio just to spite you and I'll make the best lesbian ass-licking porn ever. With a plot and everything. Then, I'll get employees to monitor your subreddit so that none of my awesome asslicking lesbian porn ends up on your subreddit so that you guys can't enjoy watching dykes eat each other's assholes. I'll get my harem of lesbians and I'll eat all their assholes too and won't let anyone else have any.
In conclusion, your ban means nothing to me. You're only losing a contributor of some amazing lesbian asslicking porn.
I never copied what I said, but roughly speaking my reply was ‘At first I was about to get angry, but then I looked through your post history… wow, now I’m embarrassed that I took you seriously. I’m not gonna put up with you any more, though. See ya!’ Then I muted him. If you want to have yourselves a good laugh, read this thread that he started. I know that you can’t see his own messages anymore, but I think that the comments speak for themselves.
December 2020: on r/Lesbian_gifs, somebody submitted a clip of two authentic lesbians having fun in the shower. Here is one of the comments that it received:
Dude, for real. When I came to this sub, I didn’t want to see actual lesbians. Jesus she’s fucking ugly.
I banned him for one day, telling him,
If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.
To which he replied:
Free speech, fucker. I’ll say whatever the fuck I want to say whenever I feel like saying it. If you can’t handle that then you can lick my spicy asshole.
This was my last response to him:
If you wanted a free speech platform then you should have picked a social network designed for that principle in mind. Reddit’s functionality is clearly unideal for free speech absolutists like yourself. In the meantime you can take some tranquillizers, stop being so angry at women, have a cup of coffee and cheer the fuck up. There’s plenty of time for you to get over your issues.
And I promptly muted him and increased his suspension to fifty days.
January 2021: I deleted a thread for being off‐topic. The subcommunity, r/lesbianasslick, was about women enjoying each others’ nether regions. The OP merely posted a photo of somebody’s nether region, with nobody attending thereto. When another guest called him out on it, this was his defense:
nope. she's literally eating her asshole. its a still pic. she just pulled away for the photographer to shoot. dont believe me, hunt down the source.
Emphasis mine. He comes up to me in modmail and sarcastically thanks me for deleting his thread ‘for no reason’. This was my reply:
It’s not my fault that people don’t read the subcommunity’s title. You can still share it at r/asshole.
As I’m doing janitorial work, I noticed that somebody wanted to play a prank on me. I asked him,
Are you the one who reported a bunch of threads with ‘no reason.’? Because if so, that’s immature of you. I’d lie down for a while if I were you, because somebody clearly needs to calm down.
After I have a two‐day absence, I see his last reply:
Some healthy snark. It's refreshing, isn't it? Up until I shove a little bit of that shit back into your face, then people like you don't think its very funny at all and then want to flex your big moderator muscles in an immature and predictable way, lol... Maybe chill with the sarcasm given the fact I violated no rule and I'm in the right here. But if there was a problem, you could easily just tell me. You don't have to be a condescending [insert racial slur here] about it. So here I am repeating myself to someone who didn't get it the first time: Why was the picture deleted?
After reading that, I replied merely with ‘You know what, just fuck off.’ Then I muted him for a week and banned him for eight hundred days. His handle was—wait for it… u/_totenkopf! I know, I’m as shocked as you are! Maybe he picked that handle to emphasize what a numbskull he was.
Another annoyance was the excess of douchebags writing ‘SAUCE?!’ (unfunny slang for ‘source’, which some users said too) in the comment sections. I don’t know why they needed the sources so badly, but most of the time I tried to provide them anyway, and I tried to include the ladies’ names in my thread titles whenever possible. I was so tired of these requests that I started providing the sources preemptively. There was one occasion, though, when a requester snapped at me in private for being inactive for so long:
Here is some friendly advice: do not insult service workers, especially when they are giving you a free service. This guy was very lucky that I shrugged off his insult and answered his request anyway, but I can assure you that almost anybody in my position would have responded much, much differently (if at all). I’ll let you use your imagination to guess how they would have responded.
What frustrated me above all were all the simpletons wasting their money on Reddit’s frivolous ‘rewards’ instead of spending that money on me. I set up a Patreon account in a vain attempt to redirect the money, but almost nobody subscribed to it. People kept giving me these useless rewards instead of something useful.
That really irritated me because I was a volunteer who had to do a lot of work, some of it unpleasant or disgusting, to keep my subcommunities in good shape, and I was getting almost nothing useful in return. In contrast, Reddit had more than enough money yet did hardly anything besides keeping the lights on. Other than enforcing copyright laws as well as very slowly banning spambots and maybe a few other accounts, they had no involvement in my subcommunities.
The last straw came in late March 2022 when several users reported a clip with a transgender woman in it as ‘off-topic’. That was when I finally decided that I had enough: I deleted my account, and consequently, the administrators deleted nearly all of the subcommunities that I moderated, since I was the most active moderator (and often the only moderator at all) in all of them. My only advice to Reddit was to delete their website, which—needless to say—they left unheeded.
I didn’t know what to do about the clip with the transgender woman. I could have either deleted it or ignored the reports, but either way, I was going to piss a lot of people off and I simply did not have the endurance to deal with the potential drama that would result. I was exhausted. I was done. And now, three years later, I am finally telling my story in public.
I have to admit, I do look back on those days with a certain level of nostalgia. They are almost enough to make me contemplate starting a NSFW Lemmy instance dedicated to all-women content, but I doubt that many would be interested in that. Hell, I don’t know if I would be interested in that.
And that, in a nutshell, is my NSFW account’s experience on Reddit. Feel free to ask me anything.
Make sense that a good automod would be needed. I wonder how prioritized that is for Lemmy and piefed. I assume a lot of the devs are mods as well.