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Reddit is threatening to remove moderators who have kept their subreddits private indefinitely in protest over the company’s API updates. Citing its Moderator Code of Conduct, Reddit said that moderators have a responsibility to keep communities active. If they don’t fulfill their duties, the company may replace them with new moderators.
“Active communities are relied upon by thousands or even millions of users, and we have a duty to keep these spaces active,” Reddit said. “If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod who wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.”
Reddit is forcing moderators to open their communities to the public
This comes after more than 8,000 subreddits went private on Monday protesting the company’s decision to levy hefty charges on its APIs. Reddit plans to monetize its data, which tech companies are using to train LLMs (Large Language Models) that form the brains of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard. However, prices are too high for indie developers who run third-party Reddit apps, including Apollo and RIF.
These apps don’t make that much money, so they won’t even be able to bear the operating cost. Unsurprisingly, these developers decided to shut down their apps. Perhaps they have been forced to shut down their years-long projects by Reddit, which is unwilling to reduce the API prices. Moreover, the proposed API changes break some moderator tools that are essential to managing subreddits. The Reddit community is understandably not happy about it.
In the meantime, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has been very critical of the community and developers, publicly lashing at some of them. He labeled the protest as a “noise” that will eventually pass. In an internal memo earlier this week, he urged employees to stay focused and stick to the plan as the blackout doesn’t affect the company’s revenue. The social network has shown no signs of leniency toward developers or made any efforts to keep third-party apps alive.
Unhappy about all of this, the Reddit community decided to extend the protest indefinitely (the original plan was a 48-hour blackout). But the company is now threatening to take action against moderators of subreddits that have gone private in this protest. Many of them have already left the protest and opened their communities to the public. But more than 4,000 subreddits are still private. We will have to wait and see how the situation evolves over the next few days.
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