Guys, this is much bigger than Reddit…

A follow-up to the last video. Rippaverse has been banned from r/comicbooks since before we launched in 2022, and the most common response I got was “who cares, it’s Reddit.” I want to explain why that answer works fine for an individual and doesn’t work at all for a business owner.

r/comicbooks has around 4 million members and is one of the largest comic book communities anywhere online. Discussion of the Rippaverse is not permitted there. I extended an olive branch recently asking them to let people talk about our books neutrally, positive or negative, same rules as any other publisher. They declined and muted me so I couldn’t respond.

As a person, I can say Reddit has a heavy bias and move on with my day. As the owner of a publishing company, I don’t get that luxury, and here’s why.

Reddit is where people end up when they search for something. Not redditors. Regular people looking up whether a thing is worth their money. When the biggest comic forum on the internet has your company classified under a rule about hate groups, and no organic conversation about your work is allowed to exist there, that is what a potential customer finds before they find your books.

Partners see it too. Anyone considering a collaboration looks at how you’re discussed publicly, and there’s a difference between being criticized and being absent.

And this goes well past one subreddit. It’s been my experience across nearly every mainstream online space. If we get covered at all, it’s a hit piece. What that does is make it uncomfortable to be seen enjoying our work. I talk in this video about a guy who entered our fan art contest, did genuinely great work, got attacked for it, backed out, and shut off his Twitter. He didn’t do anything except make art for the wrong publisher.

That’s the cost. Not to me. To him, and to the person who would have been curious and now won’t bother.

I want to be clear about something. I was never under the impression these people were going to like me. That was never the point. The point was acknowledging the reality and extending a hand anyway. Some of those attempts have gone well, genuinely. This one didn’t.

We have our own spaces, we have a Discord, and I appreciate every one of you in them. But those aren’t the public square, and that difference matters more than people think.

This one is for anybody who’s right of center and trying to enter an entertainment space. You’re up against it, and it’s exhausting, and that’s why you see creators give up and aim only at the people who already agree with them. It’s often the only door that opens.