Amid the sitewide protests from last year, Reddit community rules have been changed to restrict the moderators from protesting. Now, moderators of subreddits need to request to change their communities from public to private, and vice versa, or even to mark them as NSFW. The settings of the subreddits can be only changed after the approval of the admin (Reddit staffers).
As moderators try to change the settings, they are redirected to the support page where they need to request the approval of the admin. Laura Nestler, VP of community claimed that the rule has been changed to curb moderators from violating rules and breaking the platform.
Reddit Communities Rule Changes Pose Restrictions
Reddit’s changed policy has made the approval of admin mandatory for the change in community settings. This policy change is seen as a step towards restricting sitewide protests. The company has already taken complete control of major subreddits that participated and led the protests.
However, the company has also asked its moderators to honor the expectations of communities by making public communities accessible to all and keeping private communities as they are. On the other hand, the platform itself is limiting access for non-paid users.
What is the Reddit Sitewide Protest About?
Subreddit moderators are protesting against the API changes made by the company last year. To show disagreement and protest, moderators of more than 8000 subreddits changed their community setting from public to private leading to a major site-wide outage and impacting the overall performance of the platform.
The company said that the conversion of communities from public to private has led to several stability issues. Many moderators claimed subreddits as NSFW (Not Safe for Work) which impacted the ads in communities and their search appearance reduced gradually.
The daily traffic count of Reddit was impacted because of the sitewide protests which is seen as a major reason behind the decision to change rules for the community settings.
Why are Reddit Moderators Protesting the Community Rule Change?
In April 2023, Reddit made several API changes on their platform leading to sitewide protests. The major API changes include the introduction of paid access, limiting free access usage, and replacing API terms for third-party users to retrieve data.
Reddit introduced premier access for paid users to provide them with higher usage limits and extra capabilities which received backlash from several users and moderators. The API changes made for third-party users also failed as many third-party apps closed permanently claiming the company had not responded to them.
To encourage premium access, Reddit limited free usage access by limiting the number of queries which also received backlash and led to the subreddit protest by changing the community settings and marking them as NSFW.