Reddit’s latest policy change could prevent future protests against the platform

Reddit is changing its rules in a way that will ensure that its mods are no longer harsh.

On Monday, Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler, announced in a post on the platform’s r/modnews subreddit that the company is changing the rules for community mode settings. Going forward, moderators will be required to submit a request to Reddit instead of being able to quickly change the setting on their own.

Community type settings on subreddits are usually set by moderators and change the subreddit’s visibility from public to restricted or private. Mods can also change the Community Type settings from SFW (safe for work) to NSFW (not safe for work), restricting access to the group by age.

According to Nestler, in interview no The VergeReddit has been talking about this change behind the scenes since he joined the company in 2021.

“When a public community becomes private, all creators (even members of that community) lose access to the community and its content,” Nestler said in an announcement posted on Reddit. “Except in extenuating circumstances, societies should respect their expectations of their placement – public societies should always be accessible to everyone; private societies should always be private.”

Prevents future Reddit protests

Whether or not Reddit was discussing this change earlier in the day Reddit deletion protests last year, it will be difficult for users to see this as anything other than a change intended to prevent future opposition.

In June 2023, thousands of Reddit communities, known as subreddits, changed their Community Type settings from public to restricted or private in protest of the company’s recent changes to its API. The Reddit API was once free for developers to build on. However, the company decided to start charging for API access, which led to other popular Reddit-based apps like Apollo shutdown.

Reddit eventually had to get involved as well Go ahead other large subreddits to restore access to these communities. When a subreddit becomes private, many users and visitors are completely cut off from viewing the content posted there. Some moderators who refused to comply with Reddit were removed from their posts as moderators. The role of moderator, we should note, is not usually held by Reddit employees. Moderator is an unpaid, voluntary position and moderators are recruited from members of the Reddit community.

Reddit administrators, who will approve or deny these requests to change the type of community, there is employed by the company.

Earlier this year, Reddit became the a publicly traded company in the stock market. Social media now has as little wiggle room for its community to engage in actions that could affect a company’s traffic or revenue as they did in 2023.

New rules

According to Reddit, moderators will now have to do so send request before taking their subreddit private or changing its age restrictions.

Despite the protest, the obvious reason for the quick change of Community Type may be to avoid being flooded with abuse if the subreddit is controlled by trolls. This is the situation that the communities seem to be in great danger of after the change of this law. Some mods shared this concern in responses to the Reddit rule change post.

“Our subscribers have been subjected to large, systematic harassment campaigns in the past, sometimes for months on end,” one user wrote in the comments on Reddit’s announcement. “Privacy and manually vetting and approving each applicant have been our primary defenses in protecting our users, their photos, and their information.”

Mashable reached out to Reddit for comment on the potential issue, as well as more details about the overall change, but we didn’t hear back in time for publication.

Mods can submit these requests at any time and will receive a response within 24 hours. Subreddits with less than 5,000 members, or those less than 30 days old, will have their requests automatically approved.

Moderators can still temporarily restrict posts and comments to the subreddit under it Temporary Events the policy. Restrictions placed on a subreddit by mods due to sudden increases in traffic will not require approval from Reddit. These restrictions under Temporary Events are allowed to last up to 7 days.

Regardless of what Reddit’s true thinking is with the new rules, the changes will likely not receive a positive response from moderators as Reddit takes away the source of power these community members once had.