San Francisco: Many subreddits are adopting alternative forms of protest as Reddit threatened to take action against moderators.
Those alternative methods of protesting include publishing only one kind of post, changing the topic in focus, and days when the community turns private, reports TechCrunch.
Many of these communities participated in the June 12-14 Reddit blackout to protest against the company’s application programming interface (API) changes that are forcing some third-party developers to shut down their apps.
Moreover, subreddits considered going black indefinitely as the company decided not to make any changes.
The social discussion platform stated that moderators must keep the community open.
Additionally, they require a vote from their community before deciding to go dark.
Moderators even received messages from the platform warning them that they would be removed if they all continued to contribute to the blackout.
“To get around the moderator removal action, multiple communities are running polls to decide what type of posts are allowed on the subreddit,” the report said.
The biggest communities, including r/pics, r/aww and r/GIF, chose to share GIFs and images of comedian John Oliver.
Oliver approved this action in a tweet.
Earlier this month, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman had hosted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session to discuss the platform’s controversial API changes, confirming that the company is not planning to revive its coming API pricing changes that have caused multiple developers to announce they will be shutting down their apps.
In an internal memo sent to employees, Huffman had said that like any other blowups on the platform, “this one will pass as well”.
During the subreddits’ protest, Reddit’s average daily traffic reportedly fell as compared to the last month.
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