Reddit policy changes make sitewide protests nearly impossible

Reddit has just changed the rules so moderators of subreddits must get admin approval to switch from public to private, as originally reported by The Verge. This is being seen by many as an attempt to curb sitewide protests, as these requests must be approved by Reddit staffers. There will be no way for multiple subreddits to go private at once without Reddit having its hand on the lever.

The company put a little note on the support page that reads “if you’re changing your community type after community creation, you’ll need to submit a request.” This page doesn’t offer any reasoning behind the decision.

We reached out to Reddit to inquire about this most recent policy change and the company pointed us to a post on the subreddit r/modnews written by VP of community Laura Nestler. She wrote that “the ability to instantly change Community Type settings has been used to break the platform and violate our rules.”

So it looks like last year’s protests are absolutely connected to today’s changes. Nestler also suggested that this is an issue of personal responsibility, writing that “communities should honor the expectations they set – public communities should remain accessible to all; private communities should remain private.”

On the topic of recent protests, switching from public to private is the exact way in which subreddits expressed dissatisfaction with last year’s API pricing changes. In that case, over 8,000 subreddits went private in tandem. This means that the subreddits became inaccessible to the general public, though they remained active for current members.

The site’s daily traffic suffered as a result. This allegedly had an impact on the functionality of Reddit itself, as there was a major site outage after all of those subreddits went private. The company blamed the protests for this outage, telling Engadget that “a significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues.”

Not all protests involve switching a subreddit from public to private. Some moderators protest Reddit by labeling a subreddit as NSFW. This disallows advertising on the subreddit and makes it harder to search for. The company also put the kibosh on this move, as that kind of switch also now requires admin approval.

It’s worth noting that last year’s protests didn’t work. Reddit went ahead with those API charges, which forced third-party apps like Apollo to shut down. The company also went in and took complete control of one of the larger subreddits that participated in the protest. Now, there’s today’s change that effectively bans sitewide protests altogether.

Adding insult to injury, Reddit recently struck gold by licensing its content to train AI models. That deal will reportedly net the company around $60 million per year, but the users who actually created the content that’s being licensed will be getting approximately $0 per year.