On Sunday, November 28th, I made a post addressing my concerns over the new rules put in place at r/GoodAnimemes. Here's the post.

"I am writing this to let everyone know that as of this moment, I am temporarily disavowing myself from r/GoodAnimemes. In my opinion, they are abusing their powers as mods when it comes to the type of memes they allow.

Now, you may be thinking to yourself "What are they doing that are making me so outraged?" And for that, I am willing to explain myself.

Basically, GoodAnimemes changed the rules to where reaction images constitute as karma whoring. Therefore, reaction images are no longer allowed to be posted on the weekends. As long as a mod finds a reaction image to be deemed karma whoring, it will be removed from the subreddit.

I find this problematic for a couple of reasons. First off, you're letting each post be decided on the spot whether or not it constitutes karma whoring. That is dumb. How are some reaction images considered karma whoring but some aren't? That just makes things extremely confusing. I hope I'm wrong in my interpretation of the rule, because as it stands it makes no sense. But more important than that, GoodAnimemes is doing something I fear they were going to do: they are getting rid of reaction images for fear of flooding the subreddit. Goodanimemes was created to be a less strict version of Animemes. And yet as it stands, it has more rules than Animemes. How in the world does that make any fucking sense?

So, there you have it. Until GoodAnimemes officially changes its stance on reaction images, I am disavowing it for the time being. Because as much as I disagree with Animemes rule of limiting reaction images to the weekends, at least it's better than getting rid of them entirely."

In response, one of the mods of GoodAnimemes responded in the comments section. Here's their response.

"Hey, I think you misunderstood. We never banned reaction memes. Check the new rule 7 details. What is forbidden is to get a meme from r/meme on hot, change the irl image with a anime one, and post it as it's. Check here: https://redd.it/qll58p

In the karma whoring rule it states:

Posts that ask for karma or upvotes directly or indirectly in any way, will be removed. This includes, but is not limited to:

Bragging about upvotes, downvotes, awards, coins, followers, engagement with the post, attention, sympathy, ect.

Demanding upvotes, downvotes, awards, coins, followers, engagement with the post, attention, sympathy, ect.

Complaining about not receiving enough upvotes, downvotes, awards, coins, followers, engagement with the post, attention, sympathy, ect.

Implying that the post will/won’t die in new, reach hot, reach the front page, or get a certain amount of votes

Demanding that a post get reposted

Mentioning a user’s, character’s, or a creator’s birthday

Mentioning a user’s cake day

Posting popular memes/memes from Hot crammed into a different template (If we can find the joke on r/memes in 10 minutes, it's getting nuked)

Uploading a multi-post meme

Uploading a chain post meme

Posting sauce dumps

Posting self-referential memes

Posting “bait and switch” posts (that don’t have a natural transition)

Posting “Look over here” posts

Complaining about a post removal, a ban, or a repost. Take this up with the mod team via the comment section, or the Mod Mail function

I highlighted specifically the part of the rule that your post broke. These rules were voted with wide acceptance of the community. As you can see here: https://www.reddit.com/r/goodanimemes/comments/qqych8/rules_vote_result_and_faq/

If you don't like this rule, the correct procedure is to make a petition post, and if you get enough attention of the community we can make a vote and change it. But as it stands. Those post were rule breaking.

You can see a lot of reaction memes in the r/goodanimemes feed though, they are fine. We never banned them." ​

Now, while I can understand that the mods never banned reaction images, I still think it's a bad idea to limit reaction images based on whether or not they were inspired by posts from other places. After all, memes are rarely totally original to begin with. A ton of them are just recycled captions.

Therefore, I am creating this post with the hope of reversing the decision of posting memes that are under different templates. I feel that will stifle the creativity of the subreddit and lead to a lack of diversity when it comes to the variety of memes. With this petition, I hope to at least get a 1000 signatures and show that being inspired from places such as r/Memes does not constitute karma whoring. Rather, it's a vehicle to lead to better expression of ideas and lead to a more diverse selection of memes.