Reaction to protests: Reddit introduces changes

Reddit is giving its employees much more power over the communities on its platform in future. According to a report by US tech portal The Verge, Reddit moderators will no longer be able to change whether their subreddit is public or private without first submitting a request to a Reddit administrator. The policy came into effect on Monday and applies to the customization of all community types. According to the report, moderators must submit a request if they want to change a subreddit from "safe for work" to "not safe for work".

By requiring administrator approval for the changes from public to private, Reddit is taking away an important lever that parts of the Reddit community used last year to demonstrate against the platform's decision to charge money for API access. Popular third-party applications were and are dependent on the API. Due to the high costs and the short notice given by Reddit, many stopped using the service. This in turn made the work of the unpaid moderators more difficult, as many tools that are helpful for moderating the site are not available in the official app. They therefore organized platform-wide protests; meanwhile, they even made the site almost completely inaccessible. The protests made it clear that the ability for moderators to make their communities private at their own discretion could be used to paralyze Reddit on a large scale.

Protest action as a trigger

The Reddit blackout that accompanied the protests is one of the reasons for the policy change, as Reddit's community vice president Laura Nestler, who goes by the username Go_JasonWaterfalls on the platform, reveals in a post on r/modnews. "[...] the ability to instantly change Community Type settings has been used to break the platform and violate our rules. We have a responsibility to protect Reddit and ensure its long-term health, and we cannot allow actions that deliberately cause harm."

Although Reddit has largely returned to normal operations more than a year after the protests, they still seem to reverberate within the company. Protest is allowed on Reddit, writes Nestler. " We want to hear from you when you think Reddit is making decisions that are not in your communities' best interests. But if a protest crosses the line into harming redditors and Reddit, we'll step in."

The company said it would review requests to make subreddits public or private within 24 hours. For smaller communities with fewer than 5,000 members or newer communities that are less than 30 days old, requests would be approved automatically. If a community wants to temporarily restrict posts or comments for up to seven days, it can do so without prior approval using the "temporary events" feature. As The Verge further writes, Nestler spoke to Reddit moderators about the changes before announcing the policy change and explained the reasons. The obvious feedback was "that this will be interpreted as a punitive change", particularly in response to last year's API protests, she said. There will be no going back, she clarified.

(akn)