Reddit protest updates: news on the apps shutting down and Reddit’s fights with mods
Illustration by Alex Castro / The VergeChanges to the Reddit API have forced beloved apps like Apollo to shut down, and following the protests, mods are feeling threatened by Reddit. Continue reading…
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It happened: popular third-party Reddit apps like Apollo, Sync, and BaconReader have shut down due to the company’s planned API changes.
Ever since Apollo for Reddit developer Christian Selig revealed he’d be on the hook for $20 million per year due to the changes, Redditors have been furious over how the updates might affect third-party apps. More than 8,000 of Reddit’s communities went dark as a part of a coordinated protest.
Though Reddit announced it would exempt accessibility-focused apps from the pricing changes, things looked grim for other developers. On June 8th, Selig announced he would have to shut down Apollo, and soon after, other developers said they’d be shutting down their apps, too.
As the protests have gone on, Reddit has pushed moderators to reopen. While some have returned with their own spins on the protest, Reddit has told some mods of at least one community that it “will not” stay private and warned moderators of some closed ones that it will remove them — and it seems like Reddit’s efforts may have worked.
Here’s our coverage of the changes and unrest on Reddit.
The Reddit app-pocalyse is here: Apollo, Sync, and BaconReader go dark
Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
After a month of outrage, protests, and unrest from the community, Reddit has finally flipped the switch to shut down some third-party apps.
Apollo, an iOS app that became a rallying point for the recent protests against Reddit’s imminent API pricing, no longer loads any content from the platform. When I open it up, all I see is a spinning wheel. Developer Christian Selig confirmed to me that Reddit is the one that turned things off, not him: “would have been nice to have been given a time,” he says in an email to The Verge.
“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”
Christian Selig wrote a eulogy on the Apollo subreddit paying tribute to his app, which will be shutting down sometime Friday. (As I write this, the eulogy is at the top of r/all.)
I’m really heartbroken with how this whole process unfolded, I truly drank the Kool Aid talking to Reddit at the beginning that this was something they were going into in good faith with the interest of developers, moderators, and the community as a whole, but as many people pointed out to me, it’s clear now that ultimately wasn’t their intent. If they wanted something that could work for everyone, they would have simply made an effort to listen, instead of being dishonest, callous, and punitive in pricing. I’m sorry to all the folks who, like me, lost Apollo abruptly as a result of this. I had so much more I wanted to do with this app!
Other users are memorializing the app (and others), too.
Reddit’s new API rate limits will go into effect “shortly.”
“Rate limits will go into effect for all apps with usage above the free limit in the coming weeks, and some changes will be noticeable over the next 24 hours,” Reddit said in a post on Friday.
I’m guessing that means developers of some third-party apps like Apollo and RIF will start shutting things down soon.
Reddit says promised accessibility improvements for moderator tools in its mobile apps are rolling out.
Reddit said last Friday the features would arrive by July 1st, and today, the company said they’re now available in its iOS app and coming “shortly” to its Android app.
One commenter asked for updates on accessibility of the app in general. In response, a Reddit admin (employee) promised this:
I’ll be back in a few weeks with an update about the work we’re doing on the general app experience. We know these improvements are important, and this is a high priority for Reddit.
Apollo for Reddit pushed an update today — the same day it’s set to shut down.
Screenshot below.
One neat thing: though the app won’t let you browse Reddit very soon, you’ll still be able to customize the app icon if you want to keep it around and looking good on your phone.
Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
Fidelity has lowered its valuation of its Reddit holdings.
And that’s before the protests went down. As reported by TechCrunch:
Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund valued its holdings in Reddit at $15.4 million as of May 31, according to the fund’s monthly disclosure released Friday. That’s down 7.36% from $16.6 million mark at April’s closure and altogether a slide of 45.4% since its investment in August 2021. The updated share value suggests a $5.5 billion valuation for Reddit.
I wonder what that valuation will look like next month.
Boost for Reddit is shutting down.
The Reddit app-pocalypse is here, and the developer of Boost for Reddit, a Reddit client for Android, announced Thursday that the app will stop working after July 1st. Like others, the developer says that the price of the API is too high and is unhappy with other decisions by Reddit:
That price and the prohibition of ads makes it impossible to mantain free users. They want Boost and other third-party apps to move to a subscription model, where our users will have to pay a monthly subscription to use our apps to access reddit and get user generated content which is available for free on the website. In addition, the experience would be incomplete since the API will not return NSFW content anymore.
How Reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history
Illustration by Alex Parkin / The Verge
For more than a decade, the community in Reddit’s r/homeimprovement has been compiling a wealth of knowledge on everything you need to know about fixing up your home. Thousands of people visit the community each day looking for answers or to offer advice. But for much of the past two weeks, none of it has been accessible to the public.
“Pick it up with Reddit. That’s our stance right now,” dapeche, a moderator for the community, said in an interview with The Verge earlier this week. “We are holding the line. And if we lose the sub, we lose the sub.”
I got in touch with the developer of Narwhal.
He shared some details about how he plans to keep his Reddit app alive, and I’ve updated my story with the context. Other popular apps, including Apollo and rif is fun for Reddit, will be shutting down tomorrow.
Reddit will remove mods of private communities unless they reopen
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Reddit has informed moderators of protesting communities that are still private that they will lose their mod status by the end of the week, according to messages seen by The Verge. If a moderator tells Reddit they are interested in “actively moderating” the subreddit, the company says it will “take your request into consideration.”
Here is the full message, which we have confirmed was sent to moderators of at least two subreddits:
Reddit is trying to calm moderator fears about rules that might let users push them out.
Moderators have been on edge after CEO Steve Huffman indicated the company might consider rules that would let users vote out moderators, but based on a message seen by The Verge, a Reddit admin (employee) says that no such tool exists and that is not on the company’s roadmap.
In the message, the admin points out that only other Reddit admins can remove a top moderator from a community, but the company’s goal is to “empower communities to navigate these kinds of changes with more autonomy.” The admin says that to do so, it will “be coming up with solutions collaboratively with the moderator community.”
Reddit has already run one experiment to let users give feedback to mods, according to the admin.
The developer of RIF posted a goodbye note to RIF and a thank you to its users.
RIF, you’re quirky and rough around the edges, but you’ve always gotten the job done. You know how to get out of the way and show people the articles, discussions, pictures, and videos they came for.
You have the silliest name, but we love you all the more for it. RIF will always be fun in our hearts.
The app is set to shut down tomorrow.
“Reddit cannot survive without its moderators. It cannot.”
That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it:
Reddit cannot survive without its moderators. It cannot. It’s a symbiotic relationship. It’s giving up control. And when you do that, you’re able to say: here’s the value that they create. Here’s what they’re actually bringing to the table. And then there’s no question of whether or not they’re valuable.
This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.
Apollo for Reddit gets a new update just a couple days before it shuts down.
If you subscribed to the app, you’ll now be able to decline a refund on your remaining subscription. If you choose to do so, it could help developer Christian Selig in a big way: he’s currently looking at refund costs of about $250,000. The update also includes a wallpaper pack you can buy to help offset the costs of refunds.
Reddit is telling protesting mods their communities ‘will not’ stay private
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Reddit is pressuring moderators who have set their subreddits to private to reopen their communities this week, according to messages seen by The Verge. The company has given moderators deadlines to lay out their plans for reopening but said that they can’t stay closed.
The timeframes given generally indicate a deadline of sometime Thursday afternoon. Reddit was vague about the exact repercussions but seemed to suggest this was the final warning stage.
Yes, Google is aware of the Reddit trick for searches.
CNBC shared this from a Google all-hands this month:
At an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president in charge of search, told employees that the company was working on ways for search to display helpful resources in results without requiring users to add “Reddit” to their searches. Raghavan acknowledged that users had grown frustrated with the experience.
“Many of you may wonder how we have a search team that’s iterating and building all this new stuff and yet somehow, users are still not quite happy,” Raghavan said. “We need to make users happy.”
One tool to try and help with that is Google’s new Perspectives feed that’s designed to show results from humans. But now that many of the protesting subreddits have opened up, the Reddit trick isn’t as nerfed as it used to be.
Minecraft’s developers are stepping away from Reddit.
“As you have no doubt heard by now, Reddit management introduced changes recently that have led to rule and moderation changes across many subreddits,” a user with a flair indicating they’re a Minecraft developer wrote in a post. “Because of these changes, we no longer feel that Reddit is an appropriate place to post official content or refer our players to.”
We’ve contacted Microsoft to see if other studios it owns are taking the same approach.
If you know of other gaming studios — or any company, actually — that is moving on from Reddit in response to recent changes, I’d love to hear about it. You can email me at jay.peters@theverge.com.
“Please let us know within the next 48 hours if you plan on re-opening.”
Three Reddit moderators have just told me that Reddit is sending a message to closed communities asking if they plan to reopen.
Here’s the full message, taken from screenshots I’ve seen:
The last time we messaged you, you were still discussing your mod team’s plans to re-open your community, had decided to close your community indefinitely, or had not responded to us. Per Rule 4 of the Moderator Code of Conduct, moderators are required to be active and engaged within their communities. Given this, we encourage you to reopen. Please let us know within the next 48 hours if you plan on re-opening.
The 48-hour timing is notable; Reddit mods had asked the company for a response to an open letter by June 29th (which would be 48 hours from now), and that means that this deadline would be up just a day before many popular Reddit apps are set to shut down on June 30th.
