Many of Reddit’s communities have reopened after a protest shuttered vast swaths of the tech platform and led to outages. But tensions remain high.
Many community moderators — volunteers also known as mods who oversee Reddit’s various communities, known as subreddits — said they were reopening only because of the company’s threats against the moderators who are promoting the subreddit “blackout.”
“You are seeing this post because Reddit has threatened to open subreddits regardless of mod action and replace entire teams that otherwise refuse,” a moderator for a subreddit dedicated to news and content related to Apple wrote in a post. “We want the best for this community and have no choice but to open it back up — or have it opened for us.”
Some subreddits with millions of followers, including r/music and r/aww, are still either restricted or private.
Reddit has been in turmoil since the company announced changes in April that would force developers of some third-party apps to pay for access to the company’s systems, which had previously been free.
On Monday, hundreds of subreddits with millions of combined members protested that change by making their communities private and stopping people from posting. The coordinated protest left the platform with little content and also caused stability issues for the website, which is one of the most visited destinations on the web.
Reddit has shown no signs of backing down. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told NBC News on Thursday that the company is considering allowing users to vote out the subreddit moderators who are leading the protests. Huffman said the moderators pushing the blackout represent a minority of Reddit users and compared them to “landed gentry.” Reddit moderators are unpaid, and many have protested what they view as the platform’s attempt to maximize profits while hurting the site’s user experience.
Reddit still plans to move forward with the changes, which would charge for access to the company’s application programming interface, or API. APIs allow people to build new software on existing systems. One of the most popular ways to browse Reddit is through Apollo, an iOS app that uses Reddit’s API. The developer behind Apollo, Christian Selig, has said he would not be able to keep the program running if forced to pay for access.
Users have credited third-party Reddit apps with introducing accessibility tools for blind users as well as easier mobile moderation tools. The third-party apps are also typically ad-free.
Reddit’s planned changes mirror similar decisions made at Twitter under Elon Musk, which also recently began charging for API access.
At least one of Reddit’s moderators has had enough. In a post on the Apple subreddit, one wrote that they plan to resign.
“I’ll still be a reader of the sub, but for me, it’s time to stop helping a company who I no longer align with,” the moderator wrote. “It just doesn’t sit well with me anymore.”
