A Selfie Caused This Popular Makeup Community on Reddit to Self-Destruct

Members of one of the most popular beauty subreddits are still unable to post any new content after the moderators of r/MakeupAddiction banned themselves — without seemingly thinking of the longterm repercussions. 

Now, the moderators are hard at work trying to fix the situation since the ban was initiated on Tuesday morning, leaving 1 million subscribers in suspense. 

It all started when user kbuoy, whose real name is Katy, called out another user, anne-of-avonlea, for posting fake selfies. She alerted the moderators of r/MakeupAddiction that anne-of-avonlea had posted "selfies" of different people in the past. 

However, instead of banning anne-of-avonlea, the moderators banned Katy for 14 days, accusing her of violating reddit's terms of service by "digging through a user’s post history," which they said was equivalent to privacy violation and harassment. 

As expected, Katy was frustrated by the moderators' decision to ban a loyal member — and complained about her situation in another subreddit, r/muacirclejerk. "I honestly just posted my frustrations in r/muacirclejerk to vent my frustrations, and I was not expecting anything to happen. It was not my intention to incite a riot,” Katy told Business Insider Australia. "All of this could have been avoided if the mods would have just unbanned me on the first day. Instead, they upheld my ban (the reasoning for which changed several times) and made false accusations against me that were easily disproved with screenshots."

This snowballed into a thread on r/MakeupAddiction, where subscribers bashed the moderators for their decision to ban Katy for reporting anne-of-avonlea. 

One moderator, ComingUpMilhouse, resigned amid the controversy, writing, "I’m here to announce that I’m stepping down as a reddit moderator. I went to therapy today and my therapist is still trying to convince me that I can be in recovery for anxiety and that I can live a life without it. I realized that my fear of failure and fear of disappointing you all has kept me moderating and from taking this step." 

One hour later, the rest of the moderators banned themselves from the platform. Without any active moderators, this in effect bars anyone from making comments or posting.

"A lot has happened this week and the mods are going to ban themselves for a time due to some bad handling in the sub on our part," one moderator, fairydustandunicorns, explained. "Unfortunately, that means we cannot allow posts or comments."

They also shared an update with subscribers, revealing that they are working behind the scenes to get up and running as soon as possible. "We fully understand we need more mods since we currently don’t have enough who are active. We’ve been actively recruiting and will be introducing our new mods soon in a separate AMA thread where you can get to know them," user ThumbtacksHurt wrote. "We are also addressing some topics which have been sorely needed. More mods. We have been spending more than a considerable amount of time looking into potential new mods and vetting them thoroughly to ensure that we can assemble something approaching a dream team. We will have updates on this in the very near future."

The moderator continued, "We are also completely overhauling the rules. We have heard multiple recommendations from you, the users, and are looking to incorporate them in a clear and concise way. This very much includes how we handle stolen images. We will no longer be looking at it in the scope of normal reddit activity, but in the scope of a real potential to cause considerable harms."

As for Katy, she has moved on from r/MakeupAddiction and is urging others to join her at r/MakeupLounge. "I am dumbfounded as to why the moderators of a subreddit with over one million subscribers went out of their way to slander me and sabotage their own subreddit over an issue like this," Katy shared. "The mods would clearly rather watch the whole thing burn than act like adults and admit that they were wrong."

Or mostly making fun of the moderators who thought it was a good idea to ban themselves completely. 

If you want the shorten version of the r/MakeupAddiction controversy, we suggest watching the video below.