As first reported by The Verge, Reddit just changed its rules so that moderators of a subreddit will need admin approval to switch from public to private. Many see this as an attempt to stifle protests across the site, as these requests must be approved by Reddit staff. There’s no way to make multiple subreddits private at once without Reddit taking control of the levers.
The company has a small note on its support page that says, “If you wish to change the type of community after it has been created, you must submit a request.” This page does not provide any reasons behind this decision.
We contacted Reddit about this latest policy change, and the company referred us to a post on the r/modnews subreddit written by Laura Nestler, VP of Community. She wrote that “the ability to instantly change community type settings is being used to subvert the platform and violate our rules.”
In other words, last year’s protests seem perfectly connected to today’s changes. Nessler also suggested that this is a matter of personal responsibility, saying, “Communities should respect the expectations they set, and public communities should remain accessible to all. A private community should remain private.”
When it comes to recent protests, the switch from public to private is exactly how the subreddit expressed dissatisfaction with last year’s API price changes. In this case, more than 8,000 subreddits were made private in parallel. This means that while the subreddit remained active for current members, it was no longer accessible to the general public.
As a result, the site’s daily traffic decreased. This is said to have affected the functionality of Reddit itself, as a massive site outage occurred after all of these subreddits went private. The company blamed the outage on the protests, telling Engadget that “a significant number of subreddits went private, resulting in expected stability issues.”
Not all protests involve switching a subreddit from public to private. Some moderators have taken issue with Reddit by labeling their subreddits NSFW. This prohibits advertising on the subreddit and makes it difficult to search. The company also put the kibosh on this transition, as this type of switch also requires administrator approval.
It is noteworthy that last year’s protests were ineffective. Reddit enforced these API charges, forcing third-party apps like Apollo to shut down. The company also took full control of one of the large subreddits that participated in the protests. Well, today’s changes effectively completely ban site-wide protests.
To add insult to injury, Reddit recently struck gold by licensing content to train AI models. The deal will reportedly net the company about $60 million a year in profits, but the users who actually create the licensed content will receive about $0 a year.
