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 whether their subreddit is public or private without first submitting a request to a Reddit administrator. Policy applies to everyone's fit community typeswhich means that moderators will also have to request to change from safe for work to not safe for work.
By requiring admin approval for changes, Reddit is removing a lever that 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,” said Reddit vice president 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 Reddit API pricing changes that forced some apps and communities to shut down. Being private was effective during the protests to make a statement and raise awareness. But it also blocked content that Reddit users might have created with the expectation that it would remain public. (Going private also made Google searches worse.)
During the protests, Reddit sent messages to moderators of Protestant communities telling them that it would remove them from their posts unless they reopened their subreddits. He also publicly noted that moving to NSFW (Not Safe for Work), a tool that moderators used to add friction when accessing a subreddit and making the subreddit not eligible for advertisingIt was “not acceptable.”
More than a year after the protests, Reddit is essentially back to normal. But it seems that the company still feels it has to make changes to protect the platform.
“While we are making this change to ensure that user expectations regarding access to a community do not suddenly change, protests are permitted on Reddit,” Nestler writes. “We want to hear from you when you believe Reddit is making decisions that are not in the best interest of their communities. But if a protest crosses the line and harms redditors and Reddit, we will intervene.”
Reddit says it will review requests to make communities private or NSFW within 24 hours. For smaller or newer communities (less than 5,000 members or less than 30 days) requests will be automatically approved. And if a community wants to temporarily restrict posts or comments for up to seven days, which could be useful for a sudden influx of traffic or when mod teams want to take a break, they can do so without approval from the “temporary events” function.
Reddit worked with mods before announcing this change, Nestler tells me in an interview. The same day Nestler and I spoke, for example, she said she had discussed the changes with Reddit Mod Tipwhich 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 response that was very obvious was that this will be interpreted as a punitive change,” particularly in response to last year's API protests, he says.
I asked if Reddit would reconsider this new requirement if there was significant pushback. “We're going to move forward,” says Nestler. “We believe it is necessary to keep communities accessible. “That’s why we’re doing this.”
Nestler says the change is something the company has talked about since arriving on Reddit (joined in March 2021two years before the protests). But the protests made clear that allowing moderators to make their communities private at their discretion “could be used to harm Reddit on a large scale” and that work on this feature was “accelerated” due to the protests.
Nestler wanted to make it clear that its rules are not new and that their application is not new. “Our responsibility is to protect Reddit and ensure its long-term health,” Nestler says. “After that experience, we decided to disapprove of a way to cause harm at scale.” However, he says the company only did so “when we were sure we could take our modifications with us.”
