Another take.

Reddit is the modern day equivalent to the old Usenet newsgroups of the 1990s, but improved by moderation.

The quality of discussion the various topic separated “subreddits” varies widely, but in some instances such as r/AskHistorians the quality of the information is excellent and highly curated by strict moderation.

You’ll notice in many general Google searches asking a question about just about anything will return an answer drawn from a Reddit discussion on the topic that’s received a lot of upvotes and awards.

What’s really at issue IMO is a relatively “inside baseball” power struggle over support for 3rd party interfaces that many people prefer and are used to and to try to migrate to Reddits new and preferred UIs for mobile devices or newer web interfaces.

The problem is said to be that SOME subreddit mods have developed tools (scripts and such for filters and auto mods, duplicate posting detectors etc.) and other apps have better accessibility interfaces. Some mods are understandably annoyed at Huffman’s high handed decision making here.

Personal perspective: I’m a mod on one of the top 5% traffic subs on Reddit. I post and mod using only Reddit’s own apps and tools.

I’ve only been on Reddit actively about three years (during COVID lol) so I have never used any of the 3rd party apps people may have started with before Reddit had their own, so I don’t have an opinion on that except to say that despite the Reddit UI being somewhat clunky and difficult to learn compared to many due to complexity, especially it’s mod tools, it’s still not anything worth having a user revolt over or even complaining about. Nothing like Musk’s shenanigans at Twitter.

Our sub didn’t go dark over the protest or start just posting pictures of John Oliver. None of our 10 active mods even raised the issue on our internal chat, it just didn’t come up.