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

Updated Today, 5 minutes ago

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

It happened: popular third-party Reddit apps like Apollo, Sync, and BaconReader have shut down due to the company’s planned API changes.

Ever since Apollo for Reddit developer Christian Selig revealed he’d be on the hook for $20 million per year due to the changes, Redditors have been furious over how the updates might affect third-party apps. More than 8,000 of Reddit’s communities went dark as a part of a coordinated protest.

Though Reddit announced it would exempt accessibility-focused apps from the pricing changes, things looked grim for other developers. On June 8th, Selig announced he would have to shut down Apollo, and soon after, other developers said they’d be shutting down their apps, too.

As the protests have gone on, Reddit has pushed moderators to reopen. While some have returned with their own spins on the protest, Reddit has told some mods of at least one community that it “will not” stay private and warned moderators of some closed ones that it will remove them — and it seems like Reddit’s efforts may have worked.

Here’s our coverage of the changes and unrest on Reddit.

Highlights

PINNED

Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge

After a month of outrage, protests, and unrest from the community, Reddit has finally flipped the switch to shut down some third-party apps.

Apollo, an iOS app that became a rallying point for the recent protests against Reddit’s imminent API pricing, no longer loads any content from the platform. When I open it up, all I see is a spinning wheel. Developer Christian Selig confirmed to me that Reddit is the one that turned things off, not him: “would have been nice to have been given a time,” he says in an email to The Verge.

Read Article >
There’s already a subreddit to plan r/Place protest art.

The more than 300 subscribers on r/PlaceAPI are batting around ideas for protest art for the 2023 r/Place canvas that’s launching on Thursday.

In Reddit terms, that’s a comparatively tiny community, but they’re not the only ones thinking about how to use r/Place to share their discontent: a lot of people on Reddit’s announcement post are discussing ideas, too.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Reddit has had something of a contentious relationship with many of its moderators as of late, but now, the company is trying to make amends. A Reddit admin (employee) identifying themselves as the company’s VP of community reached out to moderators through a new post on Wednesday, inviting them to participate in things like weekly feedback sessions, an accessibility feedback group, and in-person moderator road shows.

Reddit and many moderators have been at odds since the June protests over API pricing changes that ultimately forced some third-party apps to shut down. At one point, more than 8,000 communities went dark in protest, but as the protests wore on, Reddit began sending messages to moderators pushing them to reopen, and in an interview, CEO Steve Huffman characterized moderators as “landed gentry.” Reddit’s pushback largely worked, and now, just under 2,000 subreddits remain dark, according to the Reddark tracker.

Read Article >
If you’re not a fan of the new pixelated Reddit icon on your iPhone, I have some bad news: unless you want to switch to an icon themed around the Dogecoin dog or WallStreetBets, you’ll have to subscribe to Reddit Premium to be able to use an icon that just features the regular Reddit logo, as spotted by 9to5Mac’s Benjamin Mayo.

Below are the current options. (I put them together side by side so that you won’t have to scroll through a giant vertical image.) The free ones are “OrangeRed” (the pixelated one), “Doge,” and “Wall Street,” while the icons with regular Reddit logos are at the bottom of the list.

Read Article >
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Reddit search had some issues for hours, according to posts from some frustrated Reddit users, but the problems appear to be addressed after Reddit implemented a fix.

When the issues were happening, when doing a search while logged in, I didn’t see any posts in the results. For example, if I searched “iPhone” in r/Apple while logged in on Old Reddit, I would have expected to see a lot of posts about Apple’s smartphones. But instead, I saw a message that “there doesn’t seem to be anything here.” When I searched on the app, I didn’t see any posts, either.

Read Article >
Image by Alex Castro / The Verge

Reddit users have noticed the site unexpectedly removed everyone’s chat history prior to January 1st of this year. Those asking why have been directed to a changelog update from June announcing feature updates to chats (via Mashable). The update’s headline didn’t say anything about data going away, and burying any reference to removal at the bottom with a vague, single line:

Assuming anyone read the note and made it all the way to the bottom, they apparently should’ve understood this meant everything before that date would disappear.

Read Article >
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Reddit is sunsetting its current coins and awards systems, meaning you soon won’t be able to thank a kind stranger for giving you Reddit Gold for one of your posts.

Awards are little icons on posts you might have come across while scrolling around Reddit, and they’re given by other users to show appreciation for a post. Perhaps the most commonly-known award is Reddit Gold, which shows up as a gold medal with a star, but there also reaction awards and awards specific to certain communities.

Read Article >
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The biggest Reddit community that’s still private as part of the Reddit protest is now encouraging its users to congregate elsewhere: Discord and Substack.

If you currently try to visit r/malefashionadvice, which has more than 5 million subscribers, you’ll be greeted with a page that suggests you visit the community’s Discord and Substack instead. r/malefashionadvice was a great resource for fashion conversation and guides, and the Discord and Substack offer alternative homes for those resources. Specifically, the Discord lets members of the community chat amongst themselves and post about things like fits and inspiration, while the Substack hosts a lot of guides.

Read Article >
A tool Reddit mods rely on is apparently being rate limited — even though Reddit said it wouldn’t be.

Toolbox is running into Reddit’s new API rate limits, but even CEO Steve Huffman said it should have free access. A Reddit admin (employee) says the company is looking into it.

Update July 11th, 6:40PM ET: The admin says the issue is fixed, and the user that posted the thread I linked to earlier about the issue says the issue appears to be resolved.
Reddit is apparently removing the NSFW label from subreddits that it feels shouldn’t have it.

That’s based on screenshots shared in the moderator coordination subreddit, including a message from the Reddit admin (employee) account u/ModCodeofConduct.

A few of that account’s messages have leaked online, and it openly prepared for that possibility here, too; in the message it said that “you are welcome to share a screenshot of this message with your community.”
Apple is currently featuring Apollo, a shuttered app, on the App Store.

The iOS app shut down last week. As of this writing, Apple is currently showcasing it as an Editors’ Choice app even though you can’t actually browse Reddit with it anymore. Apple is also featuring the official Reddit app right below Apollo.

Also, according to Christian Selig, the Apollo subreddit will be restricted, meaning you can’t make new posts but can chat in the comments of already-available posts.

Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
Even after Reddit’s “final warning,” r/Askwomenadvice isn’t dropping its NSFW label.

The mods of the subreddit may be removed as a result, but they’ve accepted that.

“Our ethics won’t allow us in good faith to lie to you so Reddit can make a buck,” the mods wrote. “So when the sub gets turned over to whatever scab steps forward, we hope they have the decency to run it in a way that keeps you safe.”

Read more about the response to these warnings from Reddit in my story from Thursday, which I updated a few minutes ago.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Many communities on Reddit have used the NSFW (Not Safe For Work) designation in some form to protest Reddit’s new API pricing, which forced apps like Apollo and rif is fun for Reddit to shut down, as well as a recent pattern of behavior toward its unpaid volunteer moderators that they find “threatening.” Subreddits, including r/PICS and r/military, had made the NSFW switch, pointing to language from Reddit websites to justify the change.

The moderators of the r/military community said they switched their label to NSFW because “military content has a chance to be violent content” and argued that “this subreddit should have been NSFW already, but we’d never thought to change it until recently,” according to a public post on Thursday.

Read Article >
A volunteer-made project that fights bots on Reddit is shutting down.

BotDefense, a tool that helps fight bots in more than 3,600 subreddits and has nearly 150,000 accounts on its bans list, will be going away. As for why:

The community of users and moderators submitting accounts to us depend on Pushshift, the API, and third-party apps. And we would be deluding ourselves if we believed any assurances from Reddit given the track record of broken promises. Investing further resources into Reddit as a platform presents significant risks, and it’s safer to allocate one’s time, energy, and passions elsewhere.
r/PICS mods wanted to reply to a Reddit admin message, but apparently Reddit disabled the ability for them to do so.

They posted their response publicly for the community — and, presumably, Reddit — to read. According to the mods, the admin sent the moderators a message that they violated the moderator code of conduct by going NSFW.

Reddit has said it’s “not acceptable” for communities to switch to NSFW in protest of Reddit’s policies. r/PICS is trying to make the case that it should remain so given things like profanity on the subreddit, which technically counts as NSFW under Reddit’s content policy.

Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
r/videos now only allows text posts describing videos.

Users have been voting on the subreddit’s rules, and the newest one means you’ll be seeing a lot fewer actual videos in the community.

Currently, the subreddit’s rules are:

0. Posts must be videos

1. No Porn/Nudity/Gore

2. All post titles must contain profanity

3. Only text posts describing videos are permitted, and must describe a video in detail. Video links are permitted in the comments only.

r/PICS, another big subreddit, went NSFW on Monday.
r/PICS, one of Reddit’s biggest communities, went NSFW, too.

In a tongue-in-cheek announcement post, the moderators said they had “no choice” because people had been posting profanity, which technically counts as NSFW (Not Safe For Work) under Reddit’s content policy. Despite the change, gore and pornography are still not allowed on the subreddit.

r/PICS has already been trying to stir the pot; it is one of a few subreddits now dedicated to John Oliver since reopening. We’ll have to wait and see if Reddit takes action against the subreddit, but it previously said that going NSFW to protest the company’s policies is “not acceptable.”

I would have embedded the post, but because the subreddit is NSFW, you’d have to click a button to be able to see it.
Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
If RIF is still working for you when you’re logged out, here’s why.

“When users are logged out, the app is still working because it does not use the OAuth client credentials while logged out,” developer Andrew Shu tells The Verge in an email. However, he expects that the app will stop working in this way soon.

Many third-party apps finally shut down on Friday.
Bill Gates has done many AMAs.
Photo by Saeed Adyani / Netflix

The moderators of Reddit’s IAmA community will no longer solicit and coordinate ask me anything (AMA) conversations with celebrities and high-profile individuals, they wrote in a post on Saturday.

Reddit’s AMAs featuring notable people have become an iconic aspect of the platform, giving regular users the chance to ask questions of people they may otherwise never have a chance to speak with. (Bill Gates has done 11 of them.) The AMAs are usually a fascinating mix of interesting perspective and personal anecdotes, even if the person being featured is usually doing some sort of self-promotion. And sometimes, the entertainment is reading how the AMAs go south.

Read Article >
They’re really gone.

I’m getting kind of melancholy reading posts about Reddit apps actually going kaput. It has been clear for awhile that Reddit wouldn’t budge, but part of me still hoped something would change before today.

Here’s a few of the threads I’ve seen.

Confirmed: Apollo peacefully passed away a few seconds ago.

It is gone. (Sync.)

And she’s gone. (BaconReader.)

RIP RIF.
“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”

Christian Selig wrote a eulogy on the Apollo subreddit paying tribute to his app, which will be shutting down sometime Friday. (As I write this, the eulogy is at the top of r/all.)

I’m really heartbroken with how this whole process unfolded, I truly drank the Kool Aid talking to Reddit at the beginning that this was something they were going into in good faith with the interest of developers, moderators, and the community as a whole, but as many people pointed out to me, it’s clear now that ultimately wasn’t their intent. If they wanted something that could work for everyone, they would have simply made an effort to listen, instead of being dishonest, callous, and punitive in pricing. I’m sorry to all the folks who, like me, lost Apollo abruptly as a result of this. I had so much more I wanted to do with this app!

Other users are memorializing the app (and others), too.
Reddit’s new API rate limits will go into effect “shortly.”

“Rate limits will go into effect for all apps with usage above the free limit in the coming weeks, and some changes will be noticeable over the next 24 hours,” Reddit said in a post on Friday.

I’m guessing that means developers of some third-party apps like Apollo and RIF will start shutting things down soon.
“As of now, more than 96% of our top 5,000 communities (by DAU) are open.”

That’s the latest stat from Reddit in an updated version of its “Key Facts to Understanding Reddit’s Recent API Updates” website. While more than 2,000 communities remain dark, according to the Reddark tracker, many that had shut down have opened up.

Go to Source

Share this story

Highlights