Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible

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.

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."