In recent months people have been complaining about deteriorating post quality in r/blackmagicfuckery and a lot of them have a point. The sub blew up exponentially very quickly and with that, many people from r/all started to get a wrong impression of what this sub is about.

Our mod team has had a more ‘laid back’ approach to removing posts on this sub, especially already popular posts. We want to change this and be more strict about removing posts that don’t fit the sub and have created some new guidelines which will be integrated into the rules soon.

We were only a core team of 5 mods for a while but have recently added more mods to help us clean up from now on. We already have been removing more posts recently and people have begun to notice and generally appreciate it. I think this shows we’re heading in the right direction.

Here are some new guidelines hopefully closer defining which posts qualify as bmf. The existing rules will stay as they are.

1. r/toptalent, r/woahdude and r/interestingasfuck type of posts most of the time do not fit this sub.

   Of course, there is an overlap and certain posts do qualify for both subs, but only if they have a bmf element to them. When looking at someone doing something incredible or athletic it shouldn’t be obvious what they’re doing. Instead of saying “it’s incredible he can do that, that must take an insane amount of practice/balance/skill” you should also be thinking “I see what he’s doing but it still doesn’t make sense, even with great skill this doesn’t seem possible”

2. Generally, no still pictures or memes.

   These are too easy to manipulate and often don’t qualify for bmf in the first place. Things like optical illusions however are fine.

3. No recent reposts or from top of all time

   We are fine with reposts if these are from posts in the past that did not get much attention and failed. If it is a repost of a recent post or of one taken from the top of all time of this sub they will be removed. Reposts/crossposts from other subs are fine.

4. Posting now requires a minimum comment karma of 50. This is to battle repost bots.

Some other general points we would like to address:

1. Downvote the comment from r/savagevoodoobot if you do not believe a post is in the spirit of bmf. It will automatically report the post to us. Upvotes of the post in general are not a good indicator of this because most people mindlessly upvote anything they like.

2. Camera fuckery in general is fine, it’s only posts that have been edited to deceive the viewer that will be removed.

3. We get it. All posts can be explained some way or by science. That does not mean none of them qualify as bmf or we would have to remove every single post on this sub. In general when looking at a post a complete layman in the subject should not be explainable or obvious to a complete layman. A stone falling faster than a feather is not bmf, a 110lb amboss floating on liquid mercury however is.

   Even if some topics may have been covered in middle school and you're of the opinion everybody should understand those concepts just because you do, you'd be surprised how man people did not pay attention in science class.

   There is no easy way to completely define what blackmagicfuckery is, but hopefully this post does give some clarity. No offense to the mods of r/nomagicsuckery but we certainly hope your sub will become irrelevant.

We want to thank the community for sticking with us over all this time and we hope you guys continue to provide great content.

Edit: Two additions I’d like to make.

1. Please DO NOT explain how it works in the title, it takes away from the black magic. Discussion about this should be in the comments

2. When downvoting the SVB comment you’re also welcome to leave a comment below why you think a post shouldn’t be on this sub. If I’m unsure about wether to remove a post or not I like to also look at comments giving arguments as to WHY