Comment by Expensive-Mention-90 on 30/09/2024 at 19:06 UTC

2609 upvotes, 31 direct replies (showing 25)

View submission: Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible

Here’s the text, so you can avoid giving literally 600 adtech vendors your private information, and that’s if you restrict the data collection to the bare minimum allowed.

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Reddit is giving its staff a lot more power over the communities on its platform. Starting today, Reddit moderators will not be able to change if their subreddit is public or private without first submitting a request to a Reddit admin. The policy applies to adjusting all community types, meaning moderators will have to request to make a switch from safe for work to not safe for work, too.

By requiring admin approval for the changes, Reddit is taking away a lever many communities used to protest the company’s API pricing changes last year. By going private, the community becomes inaccessible to the public, making the platform less usable for the average visitor. And that’s part of the reason behind the change.

“The ability to instantly change Community Type settings has been used to break the platform and violate our rules,” Reddit VP of community Laura Nestler, who goes by the username Go_JasonWaterfalls on the platform, writes in a post on r/modnews. “We have a responsibility to protect Reddit and ensure its long-term health, and we cannot allow actions that deliberately cause harm.”

Last year, thousands of subreddits went private to protest changes to Reddit’s API pricing that forced some apps and communities to shut down. Going private was effective during the protests in making a statement and raising awareness. But it also blocked off content that Reddit users might have made with the expectation that it would stay public. (Going private made Google searches worse, too.)

During the protests, Reddit sent messages to moderators of protesting communities to tell them that it would remove them from their posts unless they reopened their subreddits. It also publicly noted that going NSFW (Not Safe For Work), a tool moderators used to add friction to accessing a subreddit and to make the subreddit ineligible for advertising, was “not acceptable.”

More than a year after the protests, Reddit is essentially back to normal. But it appears the company still feels it has to make changes to protect the platform.

“While we are making this change to ensure users’ expectations regarding a community’s access do not suddenly change, 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.”

Reddit says it will review requests to make communities private or NSFW within 24 hours. For smaller or newer communities — under 5,000 members or less than 30 days old — requests will be approved automatically. And if a community wants to temporarily restrict posts or comments for up to seven days, which might be useful for a sudden influx of traffic or when mod teams want to take a break, they can do so without approval with the “temporary events” feature.

A GIF showing how to make a Community Type request on Reddit. GIF: Redditnormal

Reddit worked with mods ahead of announcing this change, Nestler tells me in an interview. The same day Nestler and I talked, for example, she said that she had spoken about the changes with Reddit’s mod council, which has about 160 moderators.

She characterized their reaction as “broadly measured” and said that the mods understand Reddit’s rules and why Reddit is making the change, “even if they don’t necessarily like it.” But “the feedback that was very obvious was this will be interpreted as a punitive change,” particularly in response to last year��s API protests, she says.

I asked if Reddit would reconsider this new requirement if there was significant blowback. “We’re going to move forward with it,” Nestler says. “We believe that it’s needed to keep communities accessible. That’s why we’re doing this.”

Nestler says the change is something that the company has talked about since she came to Reddit (she joined in March 2021, two years before the protests). But the protests made it clear that letting moderators make their communities private at their discretion “could be used to harm Reddit at scale” and that work on this feature was “accelerated” because of the protests.

Nestler wanted to make clear that its rules aren’t new and that the enforcement of the rules isn’t new. “Our responsibility is to protect Reddit and to ensure its long-term health,” Nestler says. “After that experience, we decided to deprecate a way to cause harm at scale.” However, she says that the company only did so “when we were confident that we could bring our mods along with us.”

Replies

Comment by [deleted] at 30/09/2024 at 21:42 UTC

1542 upvotes, 48 direct replies

[removed]

Comment by cereal7802 at 30/09/2024 at 23:18 UTC

311 upvotes, 5 direct replies

Reddit is giving its staff a lot more power over the communities on its platform. Starting today, Reddit moderators will not be able to change if their subreddit is public or private without first submitting a request to a Reddit admin. The policy applies to adjusting all community types, meaning moderators will have to request to make a switch from safe for work to not safe for work, too.

This sounds an awful lot like reddit is responsible for the content on their platform, and as such should be held responsible legally for it.

Comment by LurkyMcLurkface123 at 30/09/2024 at 22:47 UTC

165 upvotes, 5 direct replies

Reddit’s mod council, which has about 160 moderators

Can you even fucking imagine trying to have a good time with these people? Hall monitors on steroids.

Comment by madness_of_the_order at 30/09/2024 at 23:52 UTC

18 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Welp, fuck u/go_jasonwaterfalls

Comment by Vegito1338 at 01/10/2024 at 01:08 UTC

7 upvotes, 0 direct replies

People when they can’t hold stuff hostage from the owners: But also stop working for free lol

Comment by Throwadudeson at 01/10/2024 at 03:57 UTC

3 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Consent-O-Matic is a nice extension to help with all the unwanted cookie popups and GDPR forms. It's run by privacy researchers on a University in Denmark that got tired by the confusing popups that tries to trick you into giving up your data. It's open source.

Comment by ZippityZipZapZip at 30/09/2024 at 22:59 UTC*

10 upvotes, 1 direct replies

I like quotes. A lot of quotes.

The API-change, increasing control and information gathering on the user and their engagement, by requring use of the official reddit app, was so cool.

Reminder: you neither own your posts, nor do you own the communities. You are the product.

I think, above all, the worst of it: is that corporate Reddit likely feels there is something exceptional about the way they handle things; that they make reddit tick, are responsible for its success. Cute teambuilding and brainstorming about doing things the reddit-way.

Fattened pigs, counting the millions they bank, happily oinking about. Increase monetization, decrease risk, own the data, sell the data,, oink, oink, we are redditors ourself, oink, narwhal.

Comment by Last_Chants at 30/09/2024 at 23:46 UTC

8 upvotes, 0 direct replies

u/go_jasonwaterfalls gfy

Comment by Civil_Coast5912 at 01/10/2024 at 01:53 UTC

3 upvotes, 1 direct replies

What’s that about 600 adtech vendors?

Comment by SelirKiith at 01/10/2024 at 02:52 UTC

3 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Ah... the classic "Sure you can "Protest" but please do it over there and behind that wall so that nobody has to see you and you don't annoy anyone and we can simply ignore you"

Comment by THAT-GuyinMN at 30/09/2024 at 23:19 UTC

6 upvotes, 0 direct replies

In other words, they're planning some other skeevy shit that will piss everyone off, and they want to keep us from protesting.

Comment by DonutHolschteinn at 01/10/2024 at 01:51 UTC

2 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Well good luck to all the professional sports teams subs that lose the championship finals of whatever sport they are and get brigaded by opposing fans and won't be allowed to take the sub private anymore to protect it without first getting permission from mommy and daddy at the admin level

Comment by dolphin_spit at 01/10/2024 at 03:21 UTC

2 upvotes, 2 direct replies

can you explain what you mean by 600 ad vendors? just by visiting the verge?

Comment by Recklesslettuce at 01/10/2024 at 06:23 UTC

2 upvotes, 0 direct replies

What if a community just starts mass-posting tubgirl like that time we kept posting John Oliver?

Comment by DumbleForeSkin at 01/10/2024 at 07:36 UTC

2 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Reddit mods don’t even get paid. How about if they just abandoned their subreddits?

Comment by Better-Strike7290 at 01/10/2024 at 11:30 UTC

2 upvotes, 1 direct replies

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.

So you're allowed to protest, so long as your protests are ineffective and have no actual impact

Comment by Silly_Ad_2913 at 01/10/2024 at 12:38 UTC

2 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Reddit doesn't review fucking anything in 24 hours...

Also, I'm a mod, been told jack shit about this.

Comment by LaughRune at 02/10/2024 at 01:01 UTC

2 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Sounds like Reddit is about to get a whole lot shittier

Comment by Ophelia-Rass at 30/09/2024 at 19:22 UTC

3 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Of course the admins want to make all subs public or private accordingly, and take that power away from mods. How else can they force users to pay for access to subs.

Comment by binkerfluid at 30/09/2024 at 23:14 UTC*

3 upvotes, 1 direct replies

moderators shoudlnt be able to control an entire subreddit anyway. Mods have too much power unchecked on this website already. (granted I do understand they do free labor and reddit basically exploits them to exist)

They shoudlnt be able to take a sub away from users based on their whims.

If a sub has a million users why should 10 people be able to take it away?

Comment by Blarghnog at 01/10/2024 at 00:12 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

When your company is so badly behaved and poorly managed even the insanely dedicated and passionate power users revolt, the obvious answer is to take their power away.

Whatever you do, don’t look at yourself or your own insane corporate failures.

Comment by Show_Forward at 01/10/2024 at 04:36 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

i mean communities can just make only approved posts and never approve anything but ig thats weaker than private