Reddit Communities Go Private in Protest Over Policy Adjustments
Thousands of dicussion communities on Reddit have now shut doors to public access—warning signs started to appear online over past weeks, with community leaders drumming up support for a protest against the social news site's policy changes, including a strategy to monetize access to a vast pool of user data. For example the highly popular r/hardware subreddit is now "a private community"—unregistered users are greeted with a succinct message on the front page: "This subreddit is temporarily closed in protest of Reddit killing third party apps, see /r/ModCoord and /r/Save3rdPartyApps for more information." News sites are reporting that close to a total of 3500 subreddits have joined the "blackout" effort. According to the BBC this includes "five of the 10 most popular communities on the site - r/gaming, r/aww, r/Music, r/todayilearned and r/pics - which each have memberships of more than 30 million people."
A group message was shared by a moderation collective last week: "On June 12th, many subreddits will be going dark to protest this policy. Some will return after 48 hours: others will go away permanently unless the issue is adequately addressed, since many moderators aren't able to put in the work they do with the poor tools available through the official app. This isn't something any of us do lightly: we do what we do because we love Reddit, and we truly believe this change will make it impossible to keep doing what we love." A moderator (speaking to the BBC anonymously) said that the protest will be effective due to "strength in numbers," which will presumably grab the attention of Reddit's executive team.
A group message was shared by a moderation collective last week: "On June 12th, many subreddits will be going dark to protest this policy. Some will return after 48 hours: others will go away permanently unless the issue is adequately addressed, since many moderators aren't able to put in the work they do with the poor tools available through the official app. This isn't something any of us do lightly: we do what we do because we love Reddit, and we truly believe this change will make it impossible to keep doing what we love." A moderator (speaking to the BBC anonymously) said that the protest will be effective due to "strength in numbers," which will presumably grab the attention of Reddit's executive team.