One of the largest communities wants to move to Discord

Currently, if you try to reach r/malefashionadvice on Reddit, you will be redirected to a page that prompts you to visit the Discord community and Substack instead.

r/malefashionadvice, which has over five million subscribers, is on strike, along with many other major subreddits. The moderators are protesting Reddit’s handling of third-party providers and the announced API price increases, which have already led to the demise of some of the most popular Reddit apps.

The fashion community, still private as part of the Reddit protest, is now encouraging its users to leave Reddit and gather elsewhere: on Discord and Substack. The Discord server allows community members to chat with each other and post outfits and other fashion inspiration, while many fashion guides can be found on Substack.

In an email that The Verge one of the mods, who goes by the name of Zach, writes, “One of the other mods says, ‘I’ll never go back, it’s much better on Discord,’ and that’s a sentiment that most of us share.” He continues, “The community does a much better job of self-moderation, largely due to the fact that the existing repeater to new user ratio is extremely high right now.”

The substack isn’t meant to be “a subscription thing”; instead, it’s a good place to broadcast the subreddit’s guides and keep the format, Zach tells the platform. The biggest guide, Building a Basic Wardrobe, has been viewed more than 2,000 times “almost exclusively via Discord.”

Reddit doesn’t seem happy that r/malefashionadvice is still private. According to The Verge, the social media platform therefore reacted and sent the moderators of the subreddit a message threatening to replace the previous team with a new one if the community was not reopened.

“If you’re interested in being an active moderator of this subreddit, please reopen it and respond to this modmail within the next 3 days to outline your plans for the future,” Zach said. “If we don’t hear from you, we will remove your moderator status and form a new moderator team.”

In his reply to the admin, Zach wrote that the team has been actively monitoring and responding to content in the moderation queue and moderation messaging system.

However, the moderation team is undeterred by the message and plans to stay until it is removed. “We expect to be removed as a mod team from r/malefashionadvice relatively soon,” wrote one of the other mods, Walker, in a message on Discord.

“We’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has put so much time and effort into the story of the subreddit over almost 14 years.”