Reddit protest updates: news on the apps shutting down and Reddit’s fights with mods

Reddit’s moderator purge could have real impacts on reliability and information safety as it rushes to replace mods with inexperienced, poorly vetted volunteers, according to Ars Technica. With testimony by both expelled former moderators and some of those who replaced them, Ars Technica’s report shows the trouble with the company’s push to quickly replace the mods who sent their subreddits dark, marked them NSFW, or turned them into jokey John Oliver fan forums earlier this year.

Reddit began removing protesting moderators in June and said it would continue doing so until morale improves unless subreddits opened back up. Since then, Reddit has been trying to replace those it’s expelled.

The developer Relay for Reddit, of one of the remaining third-party Reddit apps for Android, detailed the potential prices for planned subscriptions for the app in a new post on Thursday. The costs of a subscription will go up based on a user’s daily average number of API calls, essentially meaning that the more things a person does in the app, the more they might have to pay.

In July, Reddit officially transitioned from a free API to one with costs depending on usage, meaning that some developers would have to pay the company for accessing Reddit’s data for their apps. The change forced many popular apps to shut down, but a handful of developers, including the one who makes Relay for Reddit, said they might be able to continue making their apps if they charged a monthly fee.

Three of Reddit’s biggest communities are no longer focused entirely on John Oliver in a form of protest against Reddit. The subreddits had made the switch in June to push back on Reddit’s API pricing that ultimately made some popular third-party apps shut down, but now, they’re operating pretty much as they did before the protests.

One of the subreddits, r/aww (which has more than 34 million subscribers), posted a long explanation for the change. While the r/aww community did vote “overwhelmingly” for the John Oliver rule, “it was never intended to be permanent,” a moderator wrote in the post, which was published earlier this week. “More than a month has passed, and as things on the internet go, the passion for the protest has waned and people’s attention has shifted to other things.”

Reddit no longer allows posts or comments on the r/Place subreddit, according to a post from a Reddit admin (employee). The company hosted the third iteration of the collaborative art project, which let users place individual pixels on a giant canvas, over the course of a few days in July.

While you can’t post or comment in the subreddit, you can still view posts and comments. A pinned post at the top of the subreddit, for example, features images of the final canvas before users posted white pixels to essentially erase everything. That post also links to a time lapse where you can see users banding together to write a very large message protesting CEO Steve Huffman in the waning moments of the r/Place project.

Reddit wrapped up its 2023 r/Place collaborative canvas on Tuesday, but if you missed it while it was happening or want to relive the evolution of the artwork, there’s a few ways to look back on the project.

If you just want to take it all in as it happened, I’d recommend watching Reddit’s official r/Place 2023 timelapse, which I’ve also embedded at the top of this post. The coordination on display is impressive. While the project was going on, users would be able to place one individual pixel every few minutes, so to do any sort of complex artwork, groups of people across Reddit would have to work together to bring their designs to life. If you want to look at the evolution of r/Place more granularly, you can scrub through the canvas’ history from the subreddit itself. (Note that you’ll need to be on New Reddit or one of the company’s mobile apps to do so.)

Reddit is starting to test a new “Official” label that will make it easier to spot if an account is authentic. The new label will appear sitewide, meaning that it won’t be up to the moderators of individual subreddits to have to verify specific accounts.

“Starting today, we’re beginning early testing of placing a visual indicator on certain profiles to provide proof of authenticity, reduce impersonation, and increase transparency across the platform,” a Reddit admin (employee) wrote in a post. “This is currently only available to a *very* small (double-digit) number of profiles belonging to organizations with whom we already have existing relationships, and who are interested in engaging with redditors and communities on our platform.”

Reddit added more space to the r/Place collaborative canvas on Friday, giving users additional room to collaboratively draw pixelated art. Almost immediately after the space was added, users started to write in their protests against the site and CEO Steve Huffman.

The expanded canvas now stretches further in both directions. When I first wrote this, there was a massive land grab taking place, including a spot memorializing the YouTuber Technoblade, the continuation of the German flag at the top of the canvas, a vertical French flag on the right side, and many iterations of the phrase “fuck spez,” a reference to Huffman’s username.

One of the weirder phenomena of the low interest rate era in tech was a tendency to see companies primarily as investments. The goal was not to have a functional business, but an exit, often via IPO or acquisition. I have begun to wonder if that explains what Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has been up to lately.

Before the Sturm und Drang of the Reddit protests, Huffman had been feeling some heat. Fidelity, an investor that led Reddit’s 2021 funding round valuing the company at $10 billion, sliced Reddit’s valuation by 41 percent; its stake, which it spent $28.2 million to acquire, was now only worth $16.6 million.

Reddit is now in charge of r/malefashionadvice, which for a time was the biggest subreddit still closed in protest of the platform’s API pricing changes. The subreddit is now open, meaning Reddit users can browse content in the community once again, though in a restricted mode, meaning only certain users can make new posts.

As we reported last week, the moderators of r/malefashionadvice, a subreddit with than 5 million subscribers, had taken the community private and were pushing its users toward Discord and Substack instead. At the time, the moderators expected to be removed after receiving a message from a Reddit admin (employee), ModCodeofConduct, telling them they would be replaced if they didn’t reopen.

Reddit officially launched the 2023 edition of its r/Place collaborative art project on Thursday morning, and it’s littered with messages protesting Reddit and Reddit’s CEO. You can see the current iteration of the canvas on the r/Place subreddit or by following the prompt at the top of the app. (Note that you can’t access r/Place on Old Reddit; you’ll need to be on New Reddit or one of the company’s mobile apps.)

In r/Place, individual users can drop a single pixel of color every five minutes on a huge canvas, including overriding other pixel placements if you want to try and claim some turf. In the utopian version of this idea, r/Place becomes an ever-changing piece of art where users work together to draw all sorts of pixelated images in one giant collage.