Welcome to Vol. 3, issue 32 of Johto Times. This week we are sharing our interview with Ferretsroq, the top mod of /r/pokemon. We also have a recap of the latest Pokémon news. Before we begin, we have a couple of announcements!

The Johto Times website opened on August 1st, 2025

Johto Times now has its own website! We’ve been working on it for some time, and it’s great to finally share it with everyone! It contains everything we have published so far and gives us more flexibility in how we display our content. We are also looking to open up a community forum in the near future, which we hope you’ll consider joining!

For now, we will continue to share our newsletter through the Substack platform, and subscribers will still receive an email each week as usual until we are sure the mailing list works on the new website. In the future, we hope to fully move over to the website. For now, please bookmark us:

Website: Johto Times

The Johto Times Favourite Pokémon Poll 2025 has now completed its preliminary stage of voting. We received hundreds of new subscribers thanks to this poll, so I wanted to let them know that we will be revealing the results next week (August 14th, 2025) in a special newsletter! On that same day, we will begin our poll for the grand final. Further details on how to vote, and the closing date, will be revealed then. A huge thank you to everyone who voted in the first poll and we hope that you’ll consider voting again for your favourites in the grand final!

Pokémon Scarlet & Violet have now surpassed their predecessors Pokémon Sword & Shield in terms of worldwide sales

Nintendo have released updated sales data for hardware and software up to June 30th, 2025. For Pokémon, Scarlet & Violet has reached a milestone of 27.15 million units sold worldwide, officially surpassing the sales of Pokémon Sword & Shield, which has sold 26.84 million units.

Source: Pokémon

Play! Pokémon Access is a new app to be informed about local events and opportunities, which was released on August 4th, 2025. With Play! Pokémon Access, players will be able to check into official in-store tournaments; view upcoming premier events in their region; track their Championship Point totals for the season; review their past in-store tournament participation; use the Event Locator to follow favourite stores and their events; search for specific cards and view translations; and earn virtual badges by completing missions, such as attending in-store events.

Additionally, starting August 14th, 2025, Play! Pokémon League locations will begin distributing Prize Pack Series Seven to Trainers who take part in local events. Cards range from popular Pokémon to exclusive foil versions of competitive staples, including Latias ex, Budew, Flareon ex, Lillie’s Clefairy ex, and N’s Zoroark ex.

Source: Pokémon, Pokémon

Those who place their preorder of Pokémon Legends: Z-A and its Nintendo Switch 2 Edition through the Pokémon Center website will receive a special bonus item: a Pokémon Gallery Pin that will feature one of the three first partner Pokémon from the game (Chikorita, Tepig, or Totodile) selected at random.

Source: Pokémon

With the release of the upcoming Mega Evolution expansion in Pokémon TCG Live, The Pokémon Company International has announced a change to booster packs. While they will continue to include both an Energy card and a code card, there will also be digital rewards when redeeming code cards from other specific product types. These new digital bonuses may include digital booster packs, promo cards, bonus currency, in-game cosmetics, or other promotional content.

Source: Pokémon

From August 11th to August 17th, 2025, Pokémon GO will host Delightful Days: Taken Over, a special in-game event featuring the return of Giovanni. A significant highlight of the event is the debut of Shadow Kyogre, available in raids on August 16th and 17th. There will also be a mission to save Shadow Giratina.

Pokémon GO has announced the return of Origin Forme Dialga and Origin Forme Palkia for a special Ultra Unlock: Origin Raid Day, taking place on August 10th, 2025. During the event, both Legendary Pokémon will appear more frequently in raids.

Source: Pokémon GO, Pokémon GO

Toxel and both forms of its evolution, Toxtricity (Amped Form and Low Key Form) will be available in Pokémon Sleep beginning August 11th, 2025. These Pokémon will appear at Greengrass Isle, Old Gold Power Plant, and Greengrass Isle (Expert).

Source: Pokémon Sleep

There are new products themed with Umbreon and Espeon in the shop on Pokémon TCG Pocket. Also, those with a Premium Pass can obtain a promotional Cleffa card and buy exclusive Lugia and Ho-Oh themed items.

Source: Twitter, Twitter

The Shiny Wo-Chien Tera Raid Battle event in Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet has been completed over 3.5 million times worldwide. As a reward, a Shiny Wo-Chien will be distributed to all players on August 8th, 2025.

Source: Pokémon

Feature: Interview with r/Pokémon

The Pokémon subreddit was created on September 11th, 2008, serving as a general Pokémon hangout for fans of the series on the Reddit platform. Thirteen years later, /r/pokemon has grown to over 4.7 million members, ranking in the top 1% of subreddits in terms of size on the website. In this interview, I spoke with Ferretsroq, the top mod of /r/pokemon, who answered my questions about his role and what the community is all about.

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/r/pokemon's custom Snoo, based off Reddit's official mascot

It’s great to speak with you, Ferretsroq! Let’s begin with an introduction! Please tell us about yourself and your role on the /r/pokemon subreddit!

Ferretsroq:

Hello! My name is Ferretsroq almost everywhere on the internet. I'm a lifelong Pokémon fan, competitive VGC player, and currently the top mod on /r/pokemon. That means I function kind of as the team lead, organizing our meetings, dealing with interpersonal stuff on the team, and generally coordinating our various events.

/r/pokemon was created on September 11th, 2008, and is one of the largest Pokémon communities on the Reddit website. For those who aren’t familiar with it, can you please explain what it’s all about?

Ferretsroq:

Reddit is kind of a weird social media site, because each subreddit is its own beast largely left to their own devices. They can be as broad or specific in their topic of choice [as they like], and in our case, we allow all things related to Pokémon. People share their fanart, cosplays, theories on the story of the games, experiences or reviews of the games, or anything else you can think of. The whole idea is that this is the generalist sub for all things Pokémon, and a central place to keep track of what more specific subreddits for Pokémon exist.

You weren’t the original creator of the subreddit, but you have been in control of the subreddit since 2015. Tell us about your story with how you first got involved with /r/pokemon and how you came to lead it.

Ferretsroq:

I first got on Reddit in 2013, and /r/pokemon quickly became one of my most-visited subreddits. In 2015, the mods at the time put up a post asking what kind of subreddit events people would be interested in. Someone there pitched the idea of a battling tournament, and the mods said they could only do that if someone who knew competitive could step in and run it. I thought about it and volunteered to do so. The tournament ran pretty smoothly, and for the next round of mod applications, I applied and was accepted as a moderator since they already knew I would be able to handle the workload.

The way mod ordering works on Reddit is that it's based purely on seniority: Whichever mod was added to the mod list first is on top, unless you ask the admins who run the overall site to reorder the list for you. Over time, mods dropped out, leaving me in the second spot beneath my predecessor, /u/bigslothonmyface (AKA Sloth). He'd been the de facto leader for some time before formally holding the top spot, and I was his second in command and ran the meetings and many events for him. When he felt it was time to step down, shortly before SwSh['s] release, I was made top mod and voted into place by the team to keep the top spot in 2019.

/r/pokemon Reddit Snoos based on Snorlax and Mimikyu

At the time of this interview, /r/pokemon has over a dozen moderators under your leadership. What insight can you share about the way the subreddit is approached as a team?

Ferretsroq:

Not counting bots, we have 25 moderators on the team that fill various roles. The number one thing we always keep in mind when managing the community is to remember the human behind the screen. There's something of a lost art of having empathy for your fellow internet-users out there, and we work very hard to keep it alive. Every decision we make and every rule we put up for vote, we ask ourselves if this is what's best for the community, and if we're keeping in mind that there are real human beings affected by the things we say and do.

From a more team management standpoint, we have a division of roles within the team, with most members being the mods who step into the queue of posts to make sure everything is following the rules and that the subreddit is remaining safe. Others are bot devs who maintain our automated tools, or CSS devs who help with graphics implementations, or event coordinators. It's important to remember that nobody's being paid for this, so as much as this might sound super serious, we always try to remember that this is still ultimately a forum for a media series, and team cohesion is best helped by making sure everyone can take a break and take care of what's important in their lives and give their all to /r/pokemon when they're good and ready.

The subreddit has a feedback and voting process, which allows the community to query specific rules to voice their opinion or seek clarification. How impactful has this process been?

Ferretsroq:

The community voting process is integral to how /r/pokemon functions. Most subreddits of our size might take feedback into consideration, but ultimately make their rules decisions behind closed doors among their mod teams. Most of the time there's no malicious intent there; it's just an issue of practicality. /r/pokemon, however, prides itself on being community-focused, and we take on the extra work and logistics of holding large rules polls to make careful adjustments in line with what our community wants. Sometimes these are big changes! Once upon a time we were adamantly opposed to memes being posted on /r/pokemon, and following a big swing in community opinion, they are now some of our most popular content.

We used to allow people to post others’ artwork, until the artist community reached out to us to inform us of how dangerous that can be to them, and now we require all art to be posted only by their original creators to make sure they get their due. Several artists have been pleasantly surprised when we require them to post on their social media accounts to verify their reddit accounts for us to avoid art theft. Oftentimes these changes dramatically impact our workflow, but the whole point of being a moderator is because we're passionate about /r/pokemon, so making these changes to keep up with the times is crucial to how we do things.

What are some of the biggest challenges moderating and curating such a large online community?

Ferretsroq:

From my point of view, there are two main challenges to moderating a large community like /r/pokemon. The first is accepting that you just can't please everyone. We want /r/pokemon to be a welcoming space for as many people as possible, but you'll never reach the point where everyone is happy with it. For an easy example, plenty of people voted against allowing memes on the subreddit, they were just outnumbered. Sometimes we have to make changes that the overall community wants, or that will grow the community in new ways, even if there are people who will be unhappy with it. It's something that's difficult to accept at first, and something we often struggle with balancing between pleasing the people who are already here versus the people who want to join but are pushed away by something or other. The second main challenge is how much busywork there is in moderating.

The bulk of the work is going through the queue of all posts that have been reported as rule-breaking by users. We read the post, the report, and then decide what to do with the post. Usually the reports are false positives and we approve the post and move on, but if a rule has been broken, we will remove the post, and depending on the exact circumstances, send a message to the author of the post to clarify what was wrong. Multiply this process by hundreds of posts at any given time (there are 180 posts in queue as I type this!) and it becomes clear why we need so many mods covering different timezones. Burnout is real, and we do everything we can to lighten the load to avoid it.

/r/pokemon in August 2025, with over four million subscribers on Reddit

In the late 90s and early 2000s, a lot of Pokémon communities thrived on Pokémon forums. While many have died out over time, platforms such as Reddit are still quite popular with internet users. Why do you think that is?

Ferretsroq:

Reddit is something of the last bastion of forums, itself being a meld between old forums and new social media. I think what keeps communities like /r/pokemon going is that they are full-on communities. Us as mods can theoretically be replaced, but the passion that Pokémon fans have can't. They want to interact with each other and share their love for the series, and they want a whole lot of other Pokémon fans to interact with. I don't know Reddit's internal statistics, but I do know that people come to /r/pokemon before other social media sites especially for things like news drops in order to get a more structured view of things without a giant scrolling chat where their voices are lost to the void.

What are your contingency plans for /r/pokemon in the event of losing access or Reddit’s closure?

Ferretsroq:

Ultimately, if Reddit shut down today, or deleted all of our accounts, or handed the subreddit over to an entirely new team, that would probably just be it for the subreddit moderation team. We are all involved in plenty of other Pokémon communities around the internet, including the /r/pokemon discord server, the Pokémon Tera Raids Discord server, the /r/VGC subreddit, and more. If the powers that be decide to destroy this one community, Pokémon fans will endeavor to find another, or create entirely new ones. We may be stewards of this subreddit, but as a mod team, we don't own the community at large. We would be sad, we would try to put word out of some other places to be through the channels we have access to, and we'd probably continue being involved in the Pokémon scene as much as our passion allows.

Given the importance of /r/pokemon and the amount of culture thriving throughout it, what precautions have you taken to ensure that the community is archived and documented so those memories can be preserved?

Ferretsroq:

Archiving the subreddit is a gigantic task, and one that we've had various efforts on throughout the years. Like anything on the internet, there's always the risk that what we've built and cherished can just vanish overnight. With that in mind, we try to archive important events, popular posts, albums, graphics, and usernames that have contributed to the subreddit in our private mod channels. A full archive is impossible, but should something ever happen to /r/pokemon, we have more than enough to potentially spread some of the memories around to interested people.

A banner made of community content by the /r/pokemon community, celebrating one million subscribers on June 28th, 2018

What do you think the role of /r/pokemon will be in the future, and its place in the Pokémon community?

Ferretsroq:

Predicting the future is always hard to say, especially when it comes to social media. /r/pokemon continues to grow right along with everything else on the internet. I think that our place in the community will change as Reddit generally has an aging Millennial/Gen X userbase. The edgy teens from when I first made an account are now adults, some with kids of their own that they are now introducing to Pokémon for the very first time. /r/pokemon from the very start has strived to be a place safe for kids while still appealing to lifelong fans. I don't see that changing any time soon, but the exact way that looks might always change as the community continues to shape the subreddit.

Let’s focus on you specifically for a moment! What were your earliest memories and introduction to Pokémon?

Ferretsroq:

My first Pokémon game was Pokémon Yellow Version, which my parents got me as a wee lad so I would stop crying in the airport because we were moving and I was maybe four years old. My earliest concrete memory is definitely when I first encountered Bulbasaur on that fateful day in Cerulean City. I fell in love on the spot and never looked back.

I am curious to see what kinds of Pokémon-related items and merchandise you have that mean something to you! What can you share?

Ferretsroq:

I have a windowsill filled with various Bulbasaur merchandise that I've collected since having disposable income as an adult. I swore as a child that I'd grab as much Bulba merch as I could since there was so little of it growing up as a kid. My most sentimental items, however, are the ones that my friends have given to me, especially during some rough times as a teenager. One friend gave me a felt Game Boy Color with a Bulbasaur-themed paper cartridge, and another crocheted a Bulbasaur for me, and it just so happens that the two fit perfect[ly] together so the GBC can ride on the Bulbasaur. It brings a smile to my face when I remember those important people.

A photograph of Ferretsroq’s crochet Bulbasaur with a felt Game Boy Color, gifts from his friends that mean an awful lot to him

Ferretsroq, thank you very much for taking the time to speak to me, and for all the work you and your team are doing for your community. Do you have any closing comments you would like to make to our readers, and to readers of /r/pokemon?

Ferretsroq:

Bulbasaur is #001 in the dex and #001 in my heart! Thank you for reaching out to us about /r/pokemon, the most hip hop and happening Pokémon community on the internet. /r/pokemon and its community rules, and I'm happy every day that I sign in to Reddit and see people sharing their passion with each other for a series we all love.

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A huge thank you to Ferretsroq for taking the time to answer all of my questions. We wish him and the rest of the /r/pokemon team the very best of luck with running the community and serving the millions of Pokémon fans who visit it.

Interview conducted on: June 17th, 2025
Interview published on: August 7th, 2025