How Will Users Feel? A Response to Apollo, Apollo, and SpicyThroat comments on the July 12th AMA Outburst
In r/ModCoord, there are four different threads that detail a wide range of participating subreddits that include well-known communities with millions of subscribers.
Many subreddits participating in the protest are going private for 48 hours, from June 12th to June 14th, but some plan to stay private until things change, according to a pinned post in the subreddit r/Save3rdPartyApps.
Apollo app developer Christian Selig, whose post about Reddit’s API pricing generated much of the initial outrage, said it was “incredibly amazing” seeing Reddit’s community come together to push back against the proposed changes. “I really hope Reddit listens,” he wrote in a post on the Apollo subreddit. “I think showing humanity through apologizing for and recognizing that this process was handled poorly, and concrete promises to give developers more time, would go a long way to making people feel heard and instilling community confidence.”
The change will make it impossible for us to keep doing what we love on the website, wrote r/Toptomcat in the post. When CEO Steve Huffman posted a poorly-received FridayAMA, many subreddits went dark.
SpicyThunder335 notes that not everyone will be able to go dark indefinitely for valid reasons. The urgent need to get the news of the ongoing war out to r/Ukraine obviously outweighs any of those concerns, as shown by the example of r/stopDrinking. It was recommended by SpicyThunder335 that weekly gestures of support on Touch-Grass-Tuesdays be left up to individual communities. SpicyThunder335 also acknowledged that some subreddits would need to poll their users to make sure they’re on board.
“Reddit has budged microscopically,” u/SpicyThunder335, a moderator for r/ModCoord, wrote in the post. They say that despite an announcement that access to a popular data-archiving tool for moderators would be restored, “our core concerns still aren’t satisfied, and these concessions came prior to the blackout start date; Reddit has been silent since it began.” The CEO’s Monday memo from Steve Huffman was bolded by SpicyThunder335 to say that more was required for Reddit to act.