Hello Everyone

It comes with great joy today that I am announcing our niche little hobby page has finally hit 100k Members. All of you will only see 73k Tapeheads - that is due to a change reddit made recently where it essentially displays the average active userbase, but on the insights tab of the mod tools it shows the true number of total members and that's what I'm sharing today with you.

I've been watching that number slowly climb for years and recently it's been something on my mind a lot lately. When I joined this sub it was a mere 6000 members - I took over from the original creator with another user u/spookyvillevideo

I've seen a lot in that time, some of you might remember the wild times when sealed VHS came into the lime light from a shady overnight website, with people who came and attacked our sub on a regular basis and even went as far as doxxing and harassing members here in real life. We've also been through eBay scams selling Disney tapes for tens of thousands of dollars and still deal with that on a daily basis. We've seen prices soar for collecting in general also, what used to be a hobby that you could buy a stack of tapes with just the change in your pockets has increased in prices dramatically (although still for the most part affordable).

With some of the bad however came a lot of good, one of the biggest is we've seen the resurgence of brand new VHS tapes being sold by both boutique and studio labels. We've also seen this hobby come back into popularity with the general public, and even more surprising with young people too. It's surprising how many members we have that are teenagers who love film and want an inexpensive way of collecting what they love; I think that something a lot of us have in common here.

All that is to say is I've been here a while and I feel like I've accomplished a lot helping shepherd this community and this hobby into what it's become today; that's why I've come to the difficult decision of retiring as the moderator of r/vhs - This has been part of my life every day for the better part of a decade and I feel like I've given what I wanted to the community. I think 100k milestone is a perfect place to part ways for me.

I just want to thank everyone here personally, you have all been such a fantastic community, seriously, in terms of actual active Mod duties and dealing with terrible people, the community has always been civil and for the most part welcoming to everyone. While I will not be a mod I will still be active in the sub as a member. Besides reddit, if anyone cares to follow me the only real online profiles I have is my letterboxd or my instagram - the latter of which will be where I do anything if I decide to do anything else online moving forward.

In terms of what's going to happen to the community next u/TravoltaFan1978 has been a mod here for many years as well and has done a lot of the heavy lifting for a while now here, I'm more than confident in their abilities in taking over the sub for me.

If you have any memories you want to share of your own here please feel free to do so below, let's all enjoy this great accomplishment for this community.

Again thanks for everything and happy 100k celebration, Merry Christmas, and a Happy new year to everyone here.

See you all at the rental store