I was interested in this and looked into it a little; It would appear that there is a bit of a fight going on between two mods of AdviceAnimals, one called Legweed who has apparently been MIA for approximately 12 months and wanted to join the blackout, and another called CedarWolf who does the heavy lifting of the moderation and didn’t want to join the blackout.

Legweed has posted DM’s between the mods found here: https://imgur.com/a/SKgjib7

In response, CedarWolf has posted this comment:

Legweed, you’ve done no modding on the subreddit for at least the past year. You haven’t said anything in modmail, you haven’t approved any submissions, you haven’t removed any spam, you’ve done absolutely nothing.

The only thing you’ve done all year is you came back out of nowhere to decide that we’re joining the Blackout, and you overrode all of the active moderators to do it.

You didn’t reply to PMs asking you what you were doing, and you didn’t discuss it or offer any compromise with the people actually doing the work until AFTER you got pushback about going dark.

That modmail thread you’re showing off? It’s from AFTER you decided to take our subreddit dark, and AFTER you made an announcement to everyone saying that’s what we were going to do.

Heck, of your actual modding that you’ve done this week, you made the announcement that we’re joining the Blackout, you’ve done some modmail, you’ve removed some comments, and you’ve approved two posts: one was normal, and the other broke three of our subreddit rules and wasn’t a meme, but you approved it anyway because it was critical of Spez.

If we ignore your mod actions for the past week, YOU’VE DONE NOTHING FOR WELL OVER A YEAR.

Now the other three of us have actually been doing the work. We’re following a decade of policy that we’ve always followed in the past: we stay open during a user protest because it gives our users somewhere to post and let their voices be heard.

It’ll be interesting if we get more instances of mod friction on other subreddits after the dust has settled