Reddit Has Taken Over A Huge Protesting Subreddit While Its Mods Were Trying To Direct Users To Discord

Reddit has taken over one of the biggest protesting subreddits, r/malefashionadvice, booting out the existing moderators. The escalation comes when one of Reddit's representatives acknowledged that the company is trying to repair its ties with moderators.

What Happened: r/malefashionadvice, a subreddit dedicated to giving fashion advice for men, has been taken over by Reddit administrators. The subreddit was one of the largest ones protesting the recent changes in Reddit's API policies.

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The moderator list on r/malefashionadvice showed ModCodeOfConduct as the only mod – Reddit has since hidden the list. The subreddit is still restricted, which means only approved users can submit new posts.

The top post right now is encouraging users to shift to Discord – something that the subreddit's moderators have been working on ever since Reddit went on an offensive against protestors.

Why This Is Important: In June, Reddit announced API policy changes that would charge exorbitant fees from third-party app developers. For instance, Christian Selig, developer of the popular third-party app Apollo, said it would cost him $20 million a year to run the app following the changes.

Reddit's drastic API changes have drawn sharp criticism from app developers, users, and many large subreddits. While most have reopened since the initial protests, most third-party applications have shut down.

Some subreddits have taken to novel ways of protesting, like posting only John Oliver's images on r/pics, one of the biggest subreddits. Others have resorted to tagging even normal posts as "not safe for work", which prevents Reddit from showing advertisements and directly impacts its revenue.

A few other subreddits have either restricted posting or turned down moderation. Others, like r/Android, are encouraging users to switch to open-source alternatives like Lemmy.

According to a tracker, nearly 2,000 subreddits are still private, while others like r/streetwear, r/dubstep, r/Tetris, and r/singedad are still in a restricted mode, which prevents users from submitting new posts and thereby bringing down the engagement and traffic, eventually reducing the advertisement revenue for Reddit.

With Reddit's Vice President of Community trying to talk again with moderators, the protests seem to have had some impact. Whether it is in earnest or not remains to be seen. So far, though, Reddit's outreach still lacks concrete steps to address the feedback it has received from app developers, moderators, and users.

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