A quick note: I'd like to think that I'm pretty neutral in this whole 'war', if you will, given that Arrow has never really been a favorite show of mine (full disclosure: I became a moderator of the sub because I did a banner a long time ago and I guess the other mods just thought it'd be quicker to give me mod powers and implement it myself), and although I still watch it, I'm mostly bored of it for other reasons than the very obvious one that seems to be causing all of this vitriol between communities.

So over the past few hours I've seen a lot of posts of people on here attacking people on Twitter and vice-versa, and it seems a bit absurd. I personally don't 'get' twitter, especially when it comes to having an actual conversation, so I'm gonna do what I can here to create a DMZ where we can all just talk and have conversations like normal human beings about the show, from the perspective of 'olicity shippers' to the perspective of people who think the show has completely jumped the shark, to anyone in between.

Vitriolic and non-constructive or shitpost-y comments will all be removed in this thread as quickly as I can get to them. That includes any kind of personal attacks or whatnot.

What brought this on was a post where I saw that (at the least) a few people have been posting screenshots of this subreddit. On top of that, in the past we've had surveys get brigaded through being posted on twitter and tumblr to the point where the data from them is completely pointless, so I know that people who aren't a part of this community read it.

So, first off, let's clear up some misconceptions:

• Someone said they had death threats and things: I know that none of the moderators of this subreddit will allow that shit to go down and will pretty much ban or at least remove the comments and give the user a warning immediately upon seeing things like that. If it's happening in PMs, there's nothing we can do about it. It's a reddit issue at that point that we have no power over.
• Doxxing: For those who don't know: "publicly exposing someone's real name or address on the Internet". Now, I've seen at least one story of someone using geolocation to harass a member of this community. I have no idea if it's true or not, but on the off chance that it is: There is nothing that we, as subreddit moderators, can do about it. Only reddit admins can ban accounts site-wide and whatnot, once again.
• "Like 50 people": I've seen it mentioned multiple times that we're apparently a really small community, but here are our unique pageviews by month since last April, and we hit between 100k and 300k unique pageviews per month, depending on if it's the offseason or not. I believe that makes up the biggest single Arrow community on the internet, at least under a singular 'banner', if you will.
• Reddit votes: I saw it mentioned that our top post only has 3000-something upvotes, but the reason for that is that reddit's upvote algorithm 'fudges the numbers' the higher a post gets in upvotes in order to combat bots from knowing how effective they actually are and to deal with vote brigading. Reddit mechanics in general are pretty odd to understand at first, but are pretty intuitive and community-empowering once you get to understand it. With a bit of googling, you can figure out exactly how it works. This brings me to...
• /r/arrow's 'Olicity hate': This kind of goes hand-in-hand with reddit's upvote/downvote thing. So, reddit is generally known as a pretty circlejerky place because popular opinion and 'easy to digest' content like puns will be upvoted much more frequently than high quality posts on most places. We've done what we can to curb this, but outside of banning certain discussion (which is unfair to the obvious majority that want to have that discussion), there's not much we, as moderators, can do.

I'm sure there are more things I can (and will) add, depending on how big this post gets.

So all of that out of the way, I feel like we kind of need this if we're going to keep from /r/arrow as a whole burning itself down, and maybe you lurkers can give us a perspective we haven't seen. As I've said, this will be up for all civilized discussion with none of it being removed, only shitposts and low-quality content.

Your regularly scheduled Grave Theory Megathread will be back up in a day or two.

^{A quick note: I just typed this up on the fly and there might be type-o's or obvious things the thread is missing. Feel free to point those out to me.}

A third quick note: I did this without notifying the other mods until after i posted it because I'm horrible at communicating.