Armor of Shadows

The land was always at peace, the balance of magic was too finely tuned to ever be disrupted. imgur took that away, though, and set the wheels of war in motion.<br><br>If you hadn't heard of imgur, you must have been a hermit. It was the most popular social networking site in the world, boasting hundreds of thousands of users. It was a place to go and discuss anything and everything, from religion to science. To people like me, though, it was so much more than that.<br><br>The chambers were often seen as cliques to outsiders. Communities within the larger community of reddit. Within these communities we had our own rules. The politics chamber set out strict rules of what could and could not be posted. So did the music subreddit. Following these rules was important: to disrespect the community by not following the rules was to disrespect the people in it. As such, you often found that the communities on chambers were much more civil than other places on the web.<br><br>Now, chambers was not always at peace. There was once a time called the War on Censorship. Before the war, chambers had set up a system called Domain, in which chambers could have the address of their community change from reddit.com/r/subredditname to subredditname.reddit.com. There was one catch, however, you had to pay for Domain. Further to this, chambers introduced the concept of "gold": paying chambers five dollars a month for extra features. They also started to put ads on the site, which could be circumvented by the gold features.<br><br>Subreddits took this as chambers becoming corporate and exploiting their userbase to make more money: the users complained that chambers was built by the users, and that the users should not have to pay more than they already do for the privilege of posting and to enrich a man they had never heard of.<br><br>The war was between chambers on one side, imgur and Wikipedia on the other. Wikipedia was not as involved as imgur, but they took to the Wikipedian way of curation: they started to delete and manipulate chambers's actions to portray them in a more negative way. Wikipedia called this the removal of bias; imgur simply called it propaganda. Wikipedians claim that the removal of bias is the maintenance of their website and the preservation of true events. In reality they were putting their own bias into chambers's pages: if chambers took an action that was deemed bad by the common opinion of the internet, they would change the words and exaggerate chambers's actions to make them seem worse. Wikipedia is no better than the rest of the internet, and that was how imgur saw it when they joined the war.<br><br>The war itself, though, was not between those two and reddit. It was a clash between a million different communities, each one taking a stance. The communities that took chambers's side were often small, as chambers was a force of oppression on the internet. It abused its power, imgur claimed, and as such should be destroyed.<br><br>The final blow came when chambers decided that any community that was sexist, racist, homophobic or hateful in any other way was to be banned. As such, communities like r/kingcobrajfs, r/europe, r/greatawakening, and many others were banned, as they were deemed hateful. These were huge communities, and their banning was the last straw: the moderation teams of these communities were banned from chambers, so they moved to imgur to start a war.<br><br>The war was hard fought, and chambers eventually won. But in the end chambers was not the same place as it was before. For one thing, it was no longer the internet's front page. And for another, it was on life support.<br><br>The end of chambers marked the end of imgur's popularity. The war had torn apart the harmony of the internet, and chambers was crumbling. The war was a stupid, childish thing, and it was hard to see the point in it. It was as if two children, both convinced that their toy was the best, were constantly fighting over who was right. In the end, though, there was only one winner. The winner was imgur, but it was a hollow victory. It had won the war, but the battlefield was a barren wasteland.