Now Reddit are coming for the individual personal subreddits

So… are you not allowed to have private subreddits any more? Is this their official stance?

It wasn't private before, it was made private in protest. I think they are just automatically messaging mods of subreddits that were public before the protests and are now private.

My overall take on this is people have a weird relationship with reddit.

Seems like it. Maybe Reddit mods should just open their communities but just stop moderating..

Clearly not otherwise that wouldn't be a feature. The issue is that there is no official stance. Any actual stance would be an admission of madness in the approach - "No taking your sub private to protest Reddit platform changes" wouldn't go down well even though that's what it is. They're trying again and again to keep things quiet, even though they keep running into the Streisand effect, something Reddit should be acutely familiar with already. There is also that saying that trying the same thing again and again and expecting a different result is insanity.

This all strikes me as Reddit and in particular their senior leadership being deeply scared. They know they probably missed the mark for IPO, they could have done it during phases of massive growth a number of years ago, or perhaps in the recently concluded tech IPO boom, but they didn't. They're now shit-scared that they are falling out of favour and losing the support of thought-leaders in the community. I'm sure user/revenue numbers are looking better than ever, but I'm also sure that the leading metrics are showing the valuable users abandoning ship and retention metrics starting to turn.

It's unfortunately unlikely to get better if they keep taking this reactionary approach, but doing anything else is a much harder move that requires strong leadership, and they've never been known for having strong leadership, except perhaps under Ellen.

Is there a social media platform people don't have a weird relationship with?

The message seems to be that if they don't keep moderating exactly how they were before this api decision that they'll get the boot. Not the official message of course, they are saying one thing and then doing another at almost every step of this drama.

> My overall take on this is people have a weird relationship with reddit.

Alternative explanation: Users may not just roll over when the platforms they've invested countless hours into start abusing them.

The official stand of Reddit is you are not even allowed to sit passively as a mod. Here is how rule 4 worded

"...This involves regularly monitoring and addressing content in ModQueue and ModMail and, if possible, actively engaging with your community via posts, comments, and voting."

Intentional sabotage is the only option left at this point.

Not sure how much choice the users have in whether reddit rolls them.

Note that "private" has two meanings here.

Private, as in a personal subreddit that can be read by others but not posted to.

And private in the sense that the subreddit is not viewable to the world at large.

In this case, the subreddit was previously "private-as-in-personal", but not "private-as-in-not-viewable". Following the Reddit Strike, I'd taken it private-as-in-not-viewable.

As my Fediverse toot notes, I'd been very aware that Reddit could reclaim the subreddit according to its rules then in place. The pinned posts on the sub, for 2 and 3 years respectively as of this past February, discussed that amongst other concerns. The Wayback Machine shows those here:

<https://web.archive.org/web/20220224161047/https://old.reddi...>

One of those posts specifically addressed my preferences for how my subreddit should allowed to die and rest in ... ouch, typo, "piece". That post received an admin response saying that it would be a good candidate for just that.

<https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>

(I'm OP in the event it's not obvious.)

This is an approach many are taking, and Reddit is still removing moderators for it.

The fact that Reddit is taking drastic action against users who aren't breaking any rules is a pretty strong sign that Reddit's leadership has gone off the deep end.

> My overall take on this is people have a weird relationship with reddit.

Yeah, and most recently we're seeing mostly one side. Reddit needs mods. But mods need Reddit. And both need users. Take any one of those three things away and the whole thing doesn't really work.

The choice they have is in whether they're around at all to be rolled.

How is Reddit abusing them? By charging $0.24 for 1000 API requests? By enforcing year old rules they created because mods power tripped and users complained?

Moderators of always-private subs, such as test or personal subs, have also received these messages.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/14faqrt/is_redd...

Same for always-NSFW.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14fjbtt/our_subre...

They have the choice to not be users anymore.

Which seems like a bad option for Reddit, given that their only value proposition is that they have a lot of users.

unmoderated communities quickly get deleted.

Users don't care, they just want to keep browsing reddit.

Power-tripping mods are the ones trying to tank the subreddits.

The communities that actually ask the users for feedback on what they want tend to all be back to normal.

I mean, maybe the outward hostility?

- https://gizmodo.com/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-moderators-land...

- https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blacko...

Or the absolutely abysmal and tonedeaf responses every chance they had?

- https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...

- https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/9/23755640/reddit-api-change...

- https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762501/reddit-ceo-steve...

Or the easily disproven libel? https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/143sho8/admins_c...

That's been doubled and tripled down on? https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/09/reddit-ceo-doubles-down-on...

Or literally changing or removing user's posts and comments? https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14fafpp/the_admin...

That all sounds abusive to me. If anything, the API price was the straw and focusing on it and ignoring literally everything that happened since is just being disingenuous.

First, mods are the group of people who are most impacted by Reddit's proposed changes, so of course they're going to be more vocal about this than the average user.

Second, are you arguing that mods aren't also users?

Based on comments I've seen, they didn't even try that hard - they're just automatically messaging mods of all private subreddits. People with subs that have been private for years are receiving messages.

Making apps effectively unusable after also making the mobile website effectively unusable is very bad behavior to your users.

Users do care. Reddit has been going through enshittification for years and this most recent change is the straw that broke the camels back. I don't know why there's so many Reddit shills on Hackernews pretending like it's just power-tripping moderators. It isn't. It's a huge subset of the Reddit community who've been using it for over a decade who are so sick of how bad it's gotten. It's obvious old.reddit is next; because Reddit was able to bust this protest, they do it again, and again.

I have an old sub-reddit I haven't used in years back from when they allowed you to use a CNAME to point a sub-reddit and get a custom "front-page" where I would share links I found interesting.

I got the same modmail message, even though I barely have 20 subscribers to that sub-reddit and it has been private since they dropped CNAME for a sub-reddit support.

Some have have started moderating more actively, with a new rule that all posts have to be John Oliver

https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/20/how-john-...

I don't think that you could ever use a feature "in bad faith" from a service provider POV, and get away with it on a moral ground alone. Forget official stance, reddit is a host, if they don't like something, they'll make it go away, as it's their platform at the end of the day. And such is the state on every private platform. It's nice until the host wants it to be.

this isn't really costing users anything, unless "time spent on Reddit" is considered a good.

great way to build confidence that reddit hears the users and promises features: use a horribly coded automated reply.