Hey guys. Just a heads-up.

Several months ago, not long after the Vive announcement, I was invited to moderate /r/Vive, along with several others, by its administrator.

Things were relatively slow, as most VR-centric discussion was being held here, and there weren't a lot of posts to moderate. /u/Schepter was working on a very cool style sheet and we were waiting for the traffic to begin to build as the HMD neared completion/soft launch.

Then, something exciting happened. A media relations guy from HTC got in contact with the mod team, and diplomatically explained how he'd like it if we could work together on the sub, as they didn't want to take it over, but help facilitate news releases and make sure we were well-equipped, if need be, to represent their brand. We also got into contact with someone managing the Vive tour, and even had some graphics made for us by HTC graphics team! They're honestly really nice guys.

Sounds great, right?! Well, we all thought so, but admin /u/500500 did not -- going into a strangely bitter rant about how the subreddit would devolve into a cold, clinical, & corporate Facebook alternative if we had any sort of relationship with them. Conspiracy theorist stuff. We can understand a hesitance if one is worried about becoming biased, or about a loss of control, but that's an unfair assessment to make when we didn't even get to test the partnership. Then he vanished, for almost a week. Wouldn't respond to a single message as we all explained thoroughly why we want to try this relationship out. After all -- we were just adding one HTC moderator with very limited abilities for the sake of easy communication with the whole team.

Since we were on-board and the administrator was AWOL, our HTC contact was added last night, again with more explanation and precaution to our admin, for whenever he returned. We really wanted a discussion with him to see why he felt hesitant.

Well, we woke up this morning to find the whole /r/Vive moderator team wiped out. We've all been deleted, and two randoms were added in our place. A goomba from Mario was added to the banner, along with this new message meant to taunt us/HTC: http://i.imgur.com/tK5CW6k.png

I wanted to give a heads-up to anyone anticipating the Vive that the subreddit /r/Vive is, unfortunately, probably not the best place to go. Maybe a better one will pop up soon, or maybe /r/SteamVR is the way to go if you're hardware-agnostic. But what was once shaping up to be a great subreddit with a direct link to HTC as a source for news and possibly exclusive content is, now, unfortunately defunct.

So if you were looking for the best place to discuss the Vive, then you might want to go to the HTC forums. Sad way to end a good sub. I'm just posting this here because of the cross-pollination of our user bases.

I apologize if this isn't a good place to post this, or looks petty & retaliatory, but this is very surprising and disappointing to us. It's hard to believe that a subreddit devoted to, primarily, an HTC product would be so combative with the very same company.

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It looks like said administrator posted a bunch of the mod mail in an attempt to misconstrue his use of the word "perks". We actually hadn't focused on that sentence. In reality we just assumed that meant their knowledge base, some free graphics, and, god forbid, some stickers. We were not bribed in any way, shape, or form. This is turning into he-said-she-said silly gossip, and I may have started that, but we were not actually expecting material 'perks'. That is being blown out of proportion and used to negate it all. What we're angry about is 500500's inability to communicate like an adult, which would have allowed us to have a civil discussion and decline HTCs suggestion. Instead, one of our moderators made a decision on our behalf, and because of his absence, but we agreed with it. Instead of reversing the decision and actually talking to us, he wiped the mod team clean and got passive-aggressive with that tinfoil hat.

I posted this because I no longer believe /r/Vive is a healthy community to discuss HTCs product, despite just being in its infancy.

Gonna go ahead and disable my inbox replies here because I've said all I wanted to say. Lots of people agree with me, and lots don't. Those that don't mostly seem to think we had shady intent where we didn't, but it's hard to change those minds. But I don't really care anymore - what's done is done and it's only the internet.